Shorter is better. I know, that’s NOT what she said, but it’s true in writing.

If it’s shorter, it will read faster and be clearer to the reader.

Now, that’s not to say that you should deliver less information, just that you should present all your information more concisely.

Making a piece shorter in this way actually takes more effort than leaving it long, which is why Mark Train once famously quipped “I had to write a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one.” But if you have time, go short.

So how do you make it shorter? First you need to make it longer. If you’re writing a book, you need to take every idea, every waking minute, all your physical strength, the last drop of blood in your heart and the sum total of your memories—then project it all with the force of a fire-hose into your work. Keep pouring it out until your creation reaches that critical mass can hold itself together with its own gravity.

Only when you’ve built it up as large as possible can you cut it down to size. When you’re ready for this stage, start with a broad axe and whack off any unrelated aspects or ideas that don’t sync with the rest. Sometimes this can be painful, because you will need to chop some things that are good and beautiful in their own way just because they don’t line up with the completed whole. Don’t worry: you can (and should) save all the scraps, and they might become your next supplement or sequel. When I was done with Mad Science Institute, I had enough ideas left over for about six more novels.

But however many scraps you end up with, you have to be ready to put them aside for now, because you’re not done with your original project yet. You still have more trimming to do.

Now it’s time to drop the broad axe and grab the scalpel. Every beginning and intermediate writer I’ve ever known would be better off cutting words even if they have room to spare.

If it doesn’t comment on the character or set the mood, then cut it. Does your reader need to know what color the car is? Maybe, maybe not. You want your writing to be as lean and as fast as Bruce Lee on five cups of coffee.

Look for repetitive sentences or unnecessary statements. Every single word should justify itself. Can you graft those two sentences to say the same thing with less? Can you replace a phrase with something just as colorful but more succinct?

Instead of saying “the bright blue car glittered in the sun,” pick either “bright” or “glittered.” You don’t need both. Make it your goal to remove one word from each sentence: you’ll find that you can’t do it everywhere, but if you can average one word per sentence then you’ll save hundreds or thousands of words over the course of a chapter or a book.

Can you cut too much? Absolutely. Keep in mind that the goal is to say more with less, not to say less with less. Kurt Vonnegut said that every sentence needs to drive the plot or show a character. Use that as your guide.

What’s your take?

Do you think I’m correct, or just crazy? Ever read a book that is great but still longer than it needs to be? Or do you think a lean manuscript loses too much flavor? Leave your comments here to tell me what you think.

The first thing most people want to know about me is the deal with my name. The full story actually goes pretty deep—if I were a character in a book, I would even say it was at the heart of a character-building moment… READ MORE –>

I’m a pretty laid-back guy and don’t often succumb to nerd rage. In fact, I kind of like Ewoks (especially when served with BBQ sauce) and I don’t even hate Gungans (except Jar-Jar).

But there’s one little blight of ignorance floating around that never fails to grind my gears. If you ever want to start a fistfight with me, skip the mamma jokes and the shoving, because your best chance is simply to utter these four words:

Boba Fett is dead.

Well, I mean, of course he’s dead because it all happened long, long ago (in a galaxy far, far away), but what I mean is that he didn’t die in the sarlaac pit. It’s simply impossible.

Now some will argue on my side because in various books and other franchises he arises, Messiah-like, to continue hunting bounties. But if it doesn’t happen on-screen it isn’t cannon. The same goes true for people who point to the Robot Chicken episodes showing his hapless attempts to escape and his squabbles with his fellow digestees.

I make my argument strictly based on canonical movies. In celebration of May the Fourth (be with you), here are my four air-tight reasons why Boba Fett would never succumb to a little thing like a sarlaac.

1.       Jango Fett

Okay, yeah, I admit Jango is dead. Decapitation is clearly a career-ending injury, even for a Fett. But we have no such clear evidence for Boba: don’t count him out until you find the body and cross-check dental and DNA evidence.

2. Armor

It takes the sarlaac 1,000 years to digest its prey. That’s a lot of time for my man to work his magic. Plus, he’s got armor, which should add at least another couple of decades to the time limit.

3. Screw Driver

Broken rocket pack? No problem. Boba shoots missiles out of his wrist, a scope in his helmet, and a belt full of other gizmos. It’s a statistical certainty that he’s got a screwdriver somewhere on his person. It’s a simple formula: broken jet pack + screwdriver = fixed jet pack.

4. Sarlaac Snack

So what if the sarlaac is holding him in there, wrapping him up with tentacles? For starters, you saw the tentacles: they’re ropey and skinny, easily cut with a laser. Second, the sarlaac is accustomed to feeding on two or three sacrificial victims at a time. That day it got a whole smorgasbord of Jabba’s men. All its tentacles are going to be occupied holding onto the likes of Klatu and Verata (and, yes, Nictu as well). When the Fett starts to put up a fight, the sarlaac is simply going to be too preoccupied to give him much resistance.

So now you see that this debate can be decisively resolved through logic and mature discussion. Also, anyone who disagrees is a poopy-headed Gungan.

May the Force be with you!

By Atomic Taco (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

For me, it’s a public bus.

There’s something about the motion, or the white-noise of the engine, or maybe it’s the passing scenery that moves quickly enough to be stimulating but is also familiar enough to ignore.

One of the biggest advantages of the bus is that if I ever need a character, all I have to do is look up. As I write this, I can see a man in an olive-drab outdoorsy coat who keeps checking his watch even though we’re not running late.

A few seats back from him, there is a woman wearing attractive business attire and a sour expression. Her stiletto heels are so long and sharp I think they could puncture a zombie’s skull.

Nearby, there is another woman who, by contrast, smiles pleasantly and seems much happier. One of her arms ends in a stump just below the elbow, and when she boarded she carried her purse strap looped over her shortened forearm.

I’ve seen grungy skater kids with pierced eyebrows, dignified office workers with polished shoes, and burly construction workers with dust-speckling vests. You can’t make up descriptions from whole cloth nearly as well as you can describe what you see on a bus.

You Can’t Make This Up

For the most part, the people on my line are very normal, and I’ve rarely seen any behavior more deviant than eating a PBJ right under the sign that says “no food.” During my years of riding, I’ve never felt threatened or grossed out, and statistically a bus is much safer than driving your own car.

But for a writer, the best moments are the abnormal ones.

Once I sat across from an extremely bulky gentleman with a shaved head, red eyebrows, and patches on his jacket that included swastikas and slogans like “Reich Out And Hit Someone.” He spent the whole ride asleep.

This, I thought, could be Brick’s little brother.

Another time there was a teenager evidently in the midst of a bad drug trip. He switched seats frantically, muttered to himself, and generally caused a commotion. We pulled over and waited until the transit security removed him by force.

As a commuter, this kind of thing means being a few minutes late to the stop. But for a writer, this is a rich vein of ideas and inspiration ready to be mined.

Lucky to Ride

I know not everyone lives in a place where they can take advantage of public transportation. Many areas don’t have service at all, and some that do are completely undesirable for other reasons (I hear riding the bus in Detroit is kind of like sitting in Mad Max’s passenger seat).

But if you have a bus stop near you, I suggest hopping on and seeing where it goes. If you’re a writer, it might bring you a story. If you’re not a writer, it might bring you an adventure just the same.

By Napoleon Sarony (1821-1896) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Someone recently said to me that Tesla was Steampunk. Maybe he looks that way because he began his work during the Victorian era and originally had all those gorgeous brass machines and wonderful dials and levers.

But here’s the thing: Tesla wasn’t a part of the steam era, his life’s work was to cause the end of it.

Maybe I’m being too persnickety. Steampunk isn’t based on a particular technology (heck, some Steampunk stories uses crystals or mental rays instead of steam). Still, somehow it seems insulting to label Tesla as steam-powered when he was the man who catapulted us out of the Victorian era and into the electrical age.

Sure, Ford’s mass-production principles changed the way goods were made and how they appeared, but we don’t call the previous era “Hand-crafted Punk” or “Wrought-Iron Punk.” And, sure, Steampunk is heavily related to the fashions, with dapper gentlemen in bowler hats and women in corsets and sweeping dresses, and goggles all around. But we don’t call it “Fashion-punk,” either. It’s that “steam” part that bugs me, because I think it would bug the heck out of Tesla, too.

I call for a new kind of punk. Let’s call it Sparkpunk. (I also thought of Teslapunk, but that seems like it would be Tesla in a Mohawk with an electric guitar. I’d pay to see that, too, but I think the term would still be too misleading.)

I’m sure you’ll tell me that I’m over-thinking this whole business about Sparkpunk, but it still seems to me that we need a new punk for a different era. Steampunk, after all, is usually set between 1850 and 1900 (or in an equivalent time in an alternative history). The Pulp era is usually considered to cover the time period between the wars. So what about those formative years between 1900 and WWI?

There’s a lot to cover in this era. The fashions were sleeker, the equipment was a little less ornate, the cities a little more crowded, but the world was forging ahead and science was just beginning to make good on its promises. Tesla was gearing up for his greatest accomplishments and greatest disappointments, governments were scheming against each other, and people everywhere were not just entering a new century, they were entering a new world. That’s Sparkpunk.

Okay, what do you think—am I just crazy, or do we actually need a new ___punk for Tesla and his contemporaries? And what other ___punk things should be named?

Photo by Dd-b, taken at the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City MO USA, at which Heinlein was the guest of honor. Detail from the wikimedia commons image RAHeinlein.autographing.Midamericon.ddb-371-14-750px.jpg. Retouched by wikipedia us

Allow me to commit science fiction blasphemy: I have a problem with some of Robert A. Heinlein’s stuff.

First, the gushing praise

While I was growing up, I adored Heinlein’s work. In fact, Have Space Suit, Will Travel
may have been the first real sci-fi novel I read. In the years that followed, I thrilled to the exploits of The Cat Who Walks through Walls
, I thumped my chest with Starship Troopers
, hopped through causality loopholes in Time Enough for Love
, and explored this alien society of ours with Stranger in a Strange Land
.

Saying that the science fiction genre owes a debt to Heinlein is tantamount to saying that the surface of the sun is mildly warm. His speculative fiction (he coined that phrase, btw) is unbeatable in its portrayals of space travel and technological advancement. In fact, he mapped out a “future history” of when things would happen—the first moon colony, the first interstellar flight, etc. and countless other writers set their own stories along this timeline.

Sadly, in real life we’re behind his schedule in many ways, but that’s a different rant.

My trouble with the grandmaster

I hadn’t read one of his books in years, but I was sadly disappointed when I re-read one of my junior-high favorites, Glory Road
, in which a Vietnam vet is recruited for a fairy-tail quest. Along the way he slays enemies that resemble ogres and fire-breathing dragons, but what I liked best was that this man views everything through a scientific lens: those dragons are really just descendants of dinosaur-like creatures that evolved the ability to belch up their flammable digestive gasses. And that “magic” toolbox that’s bigger on the inside isn’t really magic, it simply folds its interior through extra dimensions.

So far so brilliant. But for me this novel falls on its face with its portrayal of female characters. I know, I know, it was a different era with different gender-based expectations, but it still seemed unrealistic to the point of breaking my disbelief.

All of the women were gorgeous, nubile, eager to please, submissive, and free with their love. In fact, at one point the main character accidentally gives offense to a powerful nobleman by refusing to bed his host’s daughter and/or wife. When, under threat of death, he corrects this faux pas I was left thinking “how far out of the way do we need to go to provide an excuse for such a juvenile fantasy?”

The Baby and the Bathwater

It is true that Glory Road is not the best representation of Heinlein’s great works, but free love and cardboard female characters seem to be mainstays, particularly in his later books. Call me a prude, but I get a little tired of reading it.

Still, I definitely don’t want to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Heinlein’s novels are immensely good in every other way and are undeniably seminal. And I have to say that even though many of his female characters seem interchangeable, at least they are strong and intelligent, which was still in advance of many of the cultural attitudes of the time.

Back then, science fiction—and perhaps most of society—was seen as a boy’s-only club. Still, I’m glad to see how sci-fi is moving in new directions and featuring new kinds of characters. Maybe the shift started with Star Trek, which featured a variety of cultures (and genders) working in unison on an equal footing. Or maybe it was the Ender’s Game sequels, which questioned whether the “others” were truly different. Or maybe it was any number of other talented novelists and script writers who pressed boundaries and found new directions.

It’s good to see more diversity among sci-fi characters because it means more diversity among sci-fi fans. 25 years ago, if you had told me that Doctor Who would be popular among women I would have laughed, but now its majority viewership is female. It’s a different show now, but few would say that it hasn’t improved over the years.

We build the future on top of the past, and Heinlein gave us a heck of a solid foundation. For that, I am grateful. And now it’s up to us to keep building.

On Siege Tower Games blog today I wrote some words about techniques for great story pacing. Read more about the keys to story pacing. Here’s how it starts:

Anyone who’s ever rolled dice behind a GM screen or read an amateur’s novel can tell you that pacing is always one of the trickiest things to balance, but it’s also one of the most important. You need development of characters, setting, and plot, but if you have too much of it in any one spot then your story will start to resemble certain books about angsty teenage vampires (we all know the ones). On the other hand, if you have too much action, your story will feel like a low-budget porno: exciting at first (or so I’m told), but becoming monotonous after the first scene.

The trick is balance, and the technique that has always worked for me is to think of a story as having a beat, just like music. If you can mix faster scenes with slower ones in the same way musicians mix louder notes with softer ones, then you’ve got yourself a good pace…

head over to Siege Tower Games to read more!

By David A. Aguilar (CfA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

NASA is always complaining that budget cuts have been hard on them. But what have they done to earn the tiny fraction of a percent of our tax dollars that they once received? I mean, besides provide satellite technology, remote-explore Mars, keep the country on the cutting edge of technology, provide jobs, and seek out answers to the fundamental questions about our planet and our universe. If you ignore all that stuff, it’s pretty clear they need to start earning their keep.

The American Way

NASA can get funding the American way. No, not through hard work and ingenuity—geez, what America are you thinking of? I mean the REAL American way, which means trashy television that seeks out the worst people among us and rewards them with fame and fortune.

All they need to do is follow the example of so many basic cable networks: simply gather up a bunch of D-list celebrities, has-been singers, and talentless sex-pots, put them in a confined space (like a space ship) and let the cameras roll.

I’d tune in to see that. Heck, I’d even watch the webisode extras.

Vote ‘Em Off

Better still would be if we, as viewers, could vote for who goes. It would be kind of like American Idol in that we get to call in for our favorites, but also like survivor in that we’re voting them off the figurative island. And this time “the island” is planet Earth.

I don’t know about you, but I think people like the Kardashians aren’t doing anything down here except using up perfectly good oxygen, so we might as well send them to some other planet to do that.

Even if they wouldn’t be any more useful in space, at least it would be hilarious to see them trying to operate a zero-gee toilet.

See? Wouldn’t NASA be better off resorting to these kinds of stunts in order to maintain their operating budget? I think the answer is obvious.

Tell me what you think of my modest proposal in a comment.

Be sure to subscribe to this blog by email! We’re fixing the world, here, people.

By Guylaine Brunet (originally posted to Flickr as oeil) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

• Eyes: Just look into a cat’s sliver-shaped pupils and tell me that’s not a dragon looking back at you.
• Movement: Cats slide around corners and snake through small spaces. Their movements are nothing if not serpentine.
• Cold-Blooded: Sure, the textbooks say that cats are mammals, but that’s just a conspiracy. The way they seek out warm laps and sunny patches clearly shows reptilian heritage.
• Deadly breath: Dragons cough up fireballs. Cats cough up furballs. PoTAYto/PoTAHto.
• Shape-shifters: Fur instead of scales? That’s what they WANT you to see.
• Sleeping Habits: I’ve never left a stack of treasure on the floor, but judging from the amazingly improbable places cats choose for their naps, it seems likely that they would love nothing more than to curl up atop a bunch of diamonds and gold coins. In the absence of a horde of wealth, they make do with piles of clean laundry, shopping bags, or any other bed that seems even remotely more “special” than its surroundings.

Doesn’t it make sense? After all, the dragon species probably got tired of knights in shining armor always galloping around trying to slay them and take their treasure. That kind of thing really cuts into nap time, you know.

And what better position to spy on humanity than from our own laps?

Well, as long as they keep purring and chasing laser pointers instead of burning down villages, I’m happy to keep them around.

Are we living in 1984?

I mean the novel by George Orwell, not the historical year. If we were in the year, I would go buy a bunch of stock in Microsoft and then pick up all the G1 transformers, mint in box. That would be totally tubular.

But I’m talking about the 500lb gorilla of dystopian visions, the thrill-ia from Oceania, the novel that made “Orwellian” a word, the Big Brother Book with the little name: 1984.

I keep hearing that someone’s turning this book into a movie, but I’m doubtful that it will translate well to screen because there’s so much that goes on underneath the surface. It gives us a future in which advanced technology isn’t used to share information, but to control it, and in so doing controls even the thoughts of its citizens.

Big Brother packs a one-two punch of paranoia and propaganda, which makes this novel a warning that has come perilously close to being true numerous times since it was written.

East Germany was most notably Big Brother-esque during the cold war, when just about every citizen was given the part-time job of spying on every other citizen… and they were reported on if they didn’t report. The government even kept secret libraries of bottles containing stolen scent samples (old socks, for example) so that if you made a break for West Germany they could put the dogs onto your trail right away.

That’s freaky. Just plain freaky.

That level of crazy-pants propaganda has also cropped up over the years, most notably in North Korea, where the citizens are taught in school that their leader does not excrete urine or feces.

Seriously. I wish I were making that up.

Could it happen here?

Before you get all “home of the free” on me, consider what government video tapes it’s people most frequently. It isn’t China. No, it isn’t a warlord state in the Middle East or Africa, either.

It’s England. Yeah, that’s right, the British government has more security cameras on the streets of London per capita than any government in the world. These are our English-speaking allies, the country probably most similar to us in taste and language, and most closely allied to us since WWII. And New York citizens aren’t so far behind Londoners.

Maybe it isn’t a matter of national ideology about Freedom, maybe it’s simply a matter of technology and opportunity.

The Patriot Act is the Big Brother Bugbear for privacy advocates in the United States. It even has provisions that grant investigators the right to inspect your library records without you knowing about it—and if that doesn’t sound like Fahreinheit 451, then I quit.

The technology to create Big Brother has certainly now advanced to an undreamed-of level. If Google knows what your backyard looks like and Facebook knows your favorite restaurants, what might the government know?

Conspiracy theories abound about the CIA’s “Carnivore” computer that reads every single email sent in the world. Wilder theories also exist that they can spy on you through your webcams and eavesdrop on you through your phone—even if it isn’t on.

And in the cyber-warfare effort that produced viruses like Olympic Games, what’s lurking on our hard-drives that we DON’T know about?

Your conversation is being monitored by the U.S. Government courtesy of the US Patriot Act of 2001, Sec. 216 of which permits all phone calls to be recorded without a warrant or notification. For more information, visit www.crimethinc.com
By david drexler (Flickr) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Honestly, I don’t think anyone is spying on us, but it isn’t for a lack of desire. It’s because of the strenuous efforts of watchdog groups such as the ACLU, who help society find the right balance point between “catching the bad-guys” and “Big Brother.”

Right now, we seem to be doing all right at avoiding a 1984-style dystopia, although we might be at a point where certain corporations are better able to spy on us than our government.

But this doesn’t mean that we can just relax. We need to remember that it CAN happen here. Just because it hasn’t happened yet (maybe) doesn’t mean that we can become complacent. Orwell wrote that novel because that’s the future he didn’t want to happen. It isn’t a thing of the past, but it isn’t inevitable, either.

No matter what we’re told, slavery ISN’T freedom, war ISN’T peace, and most importantly, ignorance ISN’T strength.

Thank you to @ceebeemc for inspiring this conspiracy lit kick I’ve been on for the past month!

Next time I’ll look at something lighter.