Ten Ironclad Rules for Writing the Novel You Just Finished
Ten Ironclad Rules for Writing the Novel You Just Finished
By: Joel Dane
I published twenty-six books, most of them with the Big Five, before I managed to stop giving a shit. Then I wrote my passion project: a short, deranged, cozy postapocalyptic novel that I believe is about the necessity of miscommunication, though I can’t be sure.
THE RAGPICKER is the closest thing to horror that I’ve written, because the best horror embraces the unfathomable, the irrational, the unknowable. Instead of providing closure and comfort, horror offers lessons which don’t, to paraphrase Scarlett Thomas, teach us how to turn our lives into copies of stories.
The only person I’m qualified to teach about writing is me, and even that’s a stretch. Still, here are ten tips for how to write the book I just finished. (With apologies to James Carse, whose Finite and Infinite Games inspired some of this.)
- Cultivate arrogance. If you’re writing bizarre shit, you must believe in yourself one hundred percent. So the first step is to trick yourself into embracing not just confidence but ravening megalomania.
- The goal is to write a mountain of lies from which readers will unearth truths: our job isn’t to provide answers but a pack mule and a deep vein of ore. Comforting fiction makes life comprehensible — events unfold logically, questions are answered, conflicts resolved, conclusions reached — but we’re not aiming for comfort.
- Still, never write a character you don’t love.
- Embrace the irrational. Acknowledge that most conflicts can’t be resolved and most questions can’t be answered. Don’t presume that everyone who is weak wants to be strong or everyone who is broken wants to be fixed.
- Don’t promise a happy ending. Don’t assume you know what happy means. Don’t assume you know what an ending is, either.
- Pursue ideas that produce more ideas and scenes that produce more scenes.
- When you’re stuck, listen to the sound of the novel. Fuck plot, follow the rhythm. This goes back to the megalomania: trust yourself far more than you should.
- Embrace mistakes, both yours and your characters’. Life depends on errors and misunderstandings and overcorrections; we cannot make meaning without them. Celebrate
unfathomable choices
which render
even
simple numbered lists
unworkable. - Automated algorithms allow a writer to easily produce an elaborate book cover or analyze a thousand psychiatric records.
- Yet to operate AI, we must operate like AI, by framing our requests for the algorithms. Because can only ask AI to do what is possible for AI to do, we must train ourselves to restrict our queries — our explorations and experiments and expectations — to fit uncramped within the bounds of automation.
- The best AI erases itself; it turns invisible, forgotten. We demand that AIs produce results that show no evidence of algorithm or automation. I value AI most when it ceases to exist as itself and becomes instead a song, a prompt, a persona.
- When AI functions perfectly, it leaves no trace of itself. Anything that reminds me that I’m interacting with an AI is a failure of AI. When I interact perfectly with automation, I leave no trace of myself. I am an instruction in an algorithm that autocompletes datasets into permissible results.
- Sitting at my computer, emancipated from every requirement of training or talent, I convince myself that I’ve created art, but AI does not make creativity or meaning possible. AI makes it possible for me to produce without creativity or meaning.
- However, I don’t use AI for the purpose of interacting with AI but for the purpose of interacting with people. Not to shop for a shovel but to dispose of a corpse, not to improve my diet but to attract a partner.
- I beg AI to improve my dating profile. My self-image is mediated by an algorithmic, automated process that is unknown to me.
- Because AI impairs creativity in human interaction, my interactions begin to lose meaning. Because AI approaches invisibility, I am increasingly unable to detect the meaninglessness.
- Unable to quench my thirst, I drink myself to death with water as I make a request of a passing bot: please produce a story in which polydipsia and hyponatremia trigger an apocalypse.
THE RAGPICKER by Joel Dane
RELEASE DATE: July 23, 2024
GENRE: Science Fiction / Dystopian
BOOK PAGE: The Ragpicker — Meerkat Press
SUMMARY:
The Ragpicker wanders the lush, deserted Earth, haunted by failing avatars and fragmented texts. He’s searching for traces of his long-dead husband but his journey is interrupted by a girl, Ysmany, fleeing her remote village. Together they cross the flourishing, treacherous landscape towards sanctuary. Yet the signals and static of the previous age echo in the Ragpicker’s mind and whisper in the girl’s dreams, drawing them toward the gap between map and territory — while offering precious hope.
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EXCERPT
Ysmany
In my town, we named ourselves in the winter of our ninth year. That’s when I became Ysmany.
Before that, everyone called me Alice Ann. My father and mother, Server, the other kids in the children’s tent, everyone.
The morning after I took my new name I wished I hadn’t.
I missed Alice Ann.
×××
Even when I was knotting alone in the silence of the frame houses, I felt them — my family and friends and neighbors — linked to me with invisible chains, with what Server called strings or ligaments.
“That’s what love is,” my father told me. “Connection.”
“So is hatred,” I didn’t say.
My father was a good, ordinary man, and easy to hurt. Also, he was right: I loved him.
I loved his ordinary goodness.
×××
“Is love your greatest weakness?” Server asked me. “Or your greatest strength?”
“How the shit should I know?” I said, to prove I wasn’t scared of her.
×××
During town meals, I squeezed between Luz and Dmitri on our bench in the dining tent, where black-blistered acorn flatbread was served steaming from the clay oven. We tore off pieces to smear in sauces and syrups.
On celebration days, everyone got a little drunk. I liked the swimmy, floaty, bodiless feeling. Luz glowed and spun while Dmitri fell quieter and more beautiful.
Despite my gift for knotting the lampstack ligaments, I never felt more connected than during a sing-along. That rare moment when my voice stumbled into a harmony.
One time, Dmitri noticed my voice ringing true.
He smiled at me and I lost the note.
Kindness was important to him. Sometimes I thought he worked too hard at it, but even a strained kindness was still a true kindness. Maybe the truest of all. Plus, he was beautiful, with black freckles on brown skin, like Server’s lessons of braille and morsecode.
She’d started taking me aside for special instruction long before I became Ysmany. For years and years, even though I’d begged her to stop. Her attention pulled me apart from the others. Her attention loosened the weave.
Also, my father once cried after he caught us alone.
×××
The grownups were afraid of Server. I was afraid of other things, like abandonment and pregnancy and the scentless billows of information that engulfed us, even after all this time, every moment of every day. A million million yottabytes of data humming with static in our atoms and cells and breath.
“We’re living inside a corpse,” I told Luz, as she plunked acorns into a basket. “The cloud is a corpse.”
“It’s not a corpse,” she said. “It’s just history.”
Actually she said, “Don’t be stupid, Minnie.”
So a few nights later, I stood up during a meeting and said, “What if history is the corpse of the god we used to worship?”
I talked like Server sometimes, to make the others afraid.
×××
My mother thought there was something missing in me.
“Some essential lack,” she said.
×××
Server told me that causation operates identically in both directions, and that she obeyed the laws of physics but not of chronology. Something like that. She was sick in the head. All twitches were sick in the head. The secondskins that had kept them alive through the end of the world, for a hundred years or whatever, the technology that preserved their bodies also poisoned their minds.
Server had served — hah — the community for a long time. She’d built this town over generations, but now she was missing something essential.
She always treated me gently, though.
Like a kindred spirit, or a coconspirator.
×××
The twitches were finally dying, after a long decay. Like a lingering illness, my father told me, that had lasted his entire lifetime.
Server isn’t dying, I said.
Not yet, he said. But she’s slowing down.
He lowered his voice and said: Losing her grip.
×××
As the twitches dwindled, travel between settlements increased. We started seeing one or two people every few years, one or two groups. They usually shied away from our town, though they always left offerings behind.
“To help us build the lampstack,” Dmitri said.
“To appease Server,” I said.
Early that spring, a wagon stopped a day’s journey away and waited for us to make contact. When we did, they shared food and gifts. They called themselves “pioneers” in a slowly, syrupy accent that took everyone else a few days to understand.
Not me. Accents were just another kind of pattern.
The pioneers were three mothers, two fathers, a handful of grandparents, a mess of kids and a baby named VK. Their wagon was drawn by water buffalo that looked like myths. Luz fell in love with their curved horrible horns and booming chests and placid eyes. She said they reminded her of Dmitri.
We invited them into our tents and they told us about a town called Isabella where a thousand librarians recreated the enklopedia pages that flickered onto a screen scavenged from a smartfridge which technicians powered with generators remagnetized or respooled from alternators.
I didn’t understand any of that, but I thrilled to the thought of peeking through spyholes at lightning strikes of history.
×××
The pioneers talked about a land bridge.
They talked about a mass wedding.
One grandfather carved pictures into flatplanel displays. He carved the twins, Tracy and Liam, on opposite sides of a single surface, so when you looked through you saw them both at once.
Except it wasn’t Tracy and Liam, it was Server and me.
×××
The pioneers wanted to trade a buffalo calf and aluminum foil for safe passage and sweet orange preserves for the children.
“What about VK?” I asked. “He’s too young for preserves.”
A mother stroked the baby’s back. “What do you think he’d like?”
“A toy,” I said. “For when he’s old enough.”
She looked at the tokens I’d prepared. “One of those?”
“No,” I said, and Server drifted into place behind me.
The pioneers fell silent at the chilling proximity of a twitch, then listened attentively as she explained the lampstack. They already knew what it looked like: a thousand cords dangling from the rafters, joists, and beams of empty house frames, each cord knotted with dozens or hundreds of objects.
But they didn’t know why.
Server usually called the cords “strings” and the objects “nodes” so I usually called them anything else: knots, tokens, ligaments, lines, circuits, charms, trinkets, strands.
“Is it like an abacus?” one brave pioneer mother asked. “Or an oracle?”
“The lampstack is not reducible to metaphor or simile,” Server told her, with a fatal rasp in her voice.
Nobody else noticed. Not then.
×××
Server bristled at the concept of Isabella, where librarians investigated the past.
“That is dangerously unwise,” she told me. “Retreating into history.”
“Oh, bullshit,” I said.
She spun toward me, her secondskin exhaling tension.
“The past is roots,” I said. “How’s a tree supposed to grow without them?”
“It’s dangerous,” she said, clasping her hands behind her back. “This ‘enklopedia’ they consult is a cave wall and the past is shadows cast.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re afraid they’ll (just) learn the same lessons that killed everyone the last time?”
“Fragmentation,” she said. “Is a prerequisite of survival.”
Then she started ranting about hyperconnectivity, so I walked away.
×××
“Don’t test her,” my father warned me.
“I won’t,” I promised, but he knew I was lying.
Server scared everyone else, so I liked to badger her. To push the limits. Maybe I wondered what would happen if I pushed her too far.
She didn’t need me but she thought she did.
I told myself that amounted to the same thing.
×××
I collected a basket of lamb hooves from the kitchen then sat cross-legged on the lowest step with them warming my lap. They smelled of myrtle and nettle and fat, but when I licked one it didn’t taste like much.
Some I put aside for the lampstack, others I returned to the basket for the cooks and farmers. For bonemeal and broth and stuff.
“They’re all the same,” Dmitri said, squatting beside me.
“They’re miles apart,” I told him, and one by one I showed him the angles and slopes and cracks that made each hoof unique and beautiful.
He said, “Everything’s different from up close.”
I said, “Then come closer.”
No, I didn’t.
I said, “Yeah,” and ducked my head.
×××
One of the pioneer fathers told me and Dmitri that hundreds of “towers” still stood, scattered across the land. He said, “Each tower, she broadcast her signal to the nearest towers, and attracts their signal in return. Forming paths between them.”
“Like ligaments,” I said.
“Or paths,” another father said.
“Her signal, she keeps twitches away, yes?” the first one said. “She says, ‘No entry for twitches.’ So for us, towers are safe harbors or, or oasis in the desert. You know oasis?”
“We stick to the paths for safety,” the second one told us. “But there are stretches of land you cannot cross fast enough before you are caught.”
“They live thirty-five, forty miles apart,” the first father said.
“The towers do?” I asked.
“La-sha,” the first father said. “And between them? If a twitch catches your scent, they come, yes? Crack you open like a nut.”
“Now the twitches are dying,” the second one said. “Running out of the juice.”
Except the towers were running out of the juice, too.
The towers were failing, one by one by one.
×××
The grandfather swore me to secrecy and opened a safe that contained four envelopes. Each envelope contained a slip of paper that contained a broken paragraph from a long-ago source.
The grandfather said, “This is our entry into Isabella.”
“That’s what you’ll give them so they’ll let you in?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“Perhaps the reason,” he told me. “Perhaps part of the reason.”
I flipped through the packet twice.
We are marching backwards, this tangle of thorns.
The grandfather wouldn’t let me copy the words into my folder so I memorized them.
×××
I woke to find Server beside my bed, whispering a string of words: “. . . gravediggers, explanations, exhumations, infections, addictions, documentations . . .”
My heart turned to water. “Are you talking about the pioneers?”
“Plagues and wonders,” she whispered. “Validation, verification, annotation.”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “Just tell me.”
“Annotation,” she repeated, and the machine bulk of her drifted noiselessly toward the tent flap. “Marginalization, vivisection, selection, election . . .”
I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. I watched her leave, then I went back to sleep, that’s what I did. I went back to sleep, and that was the night she —
That was the night.
×××
A week later, I stretched out on the floor in the house frame numbered 307.
The concrete slab was cool on my back through my shirt. Cascades of knotted cords dangled from the beams and fell around me like a downpour. Colors shifted in and out of focus. My eyeballs itched on the inside: something felt out of place, like bats on a branch in daylight.
The ligaments connected me to fence lizards and concrete slabs and boargrass, but mostly to people. I counted two hundred and twenty-four souls in town. Everyone else counted two hundred and twenty-three.
That was not close, that was a chasm.
I was going to betray them: my friends, my town, my father. Server. Maybe even myself.
I needed to, though I didn’t know why. Why now? Why for this?
I didn’t care why. “Why” didn’t mean anything. We didn’t ask “why” when we wanted an explanation, we asked when we wanted a myth.
×××
The two hundred and twenty-fourth soul in town was the baby.
Server murdered his mothers and fathers, his siblings and grandparents. She killed them and left the corpses for me to weave into the lampstack.
She’d kill the baby next, if I didn’t take him away, and I couldn’t take him away.
Not without help.
×××
Days passed. Weeks. Server watched the lampstack, I watched her.
Then Liam and Rucky reported an intruder camping past the reservoir: a wanderer, a twitch, moving across our land like an eagle’s shadow.
Liam’s twin sister Tracy frowned. She hated that Server sent Liam on sentry duty but not her.
“Boys are less important,” Suzena told her. “That is biology.”
“He’s so unimportant he gets to do whatever he wants,” Tracy said.
“The wanderer could be a scout,” Liam told Server. “Or could be an outcast.”
“He looks like a twitch,” Rucky repeated.
He looks like an opportunity, I didn’t say. He looks like my only chance to save the baby.
“Take a team,” Server told Rucky. “And retrieve a datum for the lampstack.
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