Lessons About Writing #2: Don’t Get Fancy

This is more on what I took away while working on my first sci-fi novel “Atypical (Saints of the Void, Book 1),” which is available free in a bunch of places including iTunes and Smashwords, and for $.099 on Amazon (because Amazon doesn’t let me give it away).

This blog is essentially just one subject, and that’s keeping my work and style at my own intelligence and enjoyment level rather than trying to be smarter than I am.

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Sometimes I’ll read a book (or lately listen to one) and be so impressed with how the author used words that I’ll be desperately wishing I could be that complex. Then I would remember something I read or saw that was so up its own a** my eyes were sore from all the rolling.

My writing is incredibly laymen by any standard, and I've gotten to love that, to cultivate it on every page. I'd rather make something that people can understand and put together than a story crammed full of stuff like overly complex metaphors or whatever.

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If I hear someone break down a movie and say things like “I caught the ending early on” and explain the ludicrously minute details that got them there, I’m not impressed. Great job, you analyzed something so much that you were pissed about it and took little to no joy from it (edit: though I guess that can be another form of joy, who am I to judge, honestly?).

It annoys me when people break down something I've done like that, splitting it into multiple levels of hippie-dippie hipster garbage when I meant all of one or two things total. They’ll make a loaded stack of pancakes out of two crepes and a handful of blueberries. I think my work (though the first book in the Saints universe is less than half the story) deserves popcorn-crunching and smirks rather than wine-sipping and head nods.

Maybe I succeeded at making that fun-and-interesting thing, maybe I didn’t, but I sure as heck made sure I didn’t go overboard.

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One of my favorite things in "Atypical" is a mention of a floating, talking apple pie with pants that serves as a subconscious librarian. His name is “Pie Pants.” I laughed when I came up with that because it is the essence of my style: a somewhat serious train of thought commandeered momentarily for possibly the dumbest two or three sentences in the entire book, and it’s in the third to last chapter.

When I think I’m getting too full of myself while working on the sequel, I think of Pie Pants. It makes me chuckle in just the right way and reminds me to never even attempt to be someone who writes anything more than fun adventures with character, humor, danger, and clever action; I’ll never be less than happy to plant my flag on that particular moon.