Wednesday, May 5, 2010

advice to murderers


Continuing on with my series of advisory tips to any potential psychos on Twitter who want to rob and kill me, here is tip number one:

1. I never look under my car when I get into it.

Just so you know, too, my car is alarmed, so be careful. I hate car alarms, actually, but mine happens to be one of those super-automatic kinds that can actually produce conscious thought that exceeds the level of intelligence of most writers.

So, be careful.

And, anyway, hearing a car alarm go off up here where I live is every bit as unnerving as hearing a rattlesnake buzz on 5th Avenue in New York City. Not that you'd be able to hear a rattlesnake, because of all the car alarms going off.

I'm going to paraphrase, evade, and hide identities here for just a moment (as I celebrate my cowardice... well, I call it diplomacy), but the reason I made that backhanded jab about how dumb some writers are is that yesterday, a friend pointed out a post on a particular social networking site where an author publicly announced the following (paraphrased here):

Attention, all my writer friends out there: I need help making characters that make sense and are believable. Do you have any advice or know of any books that can show how to do this?

I am not kidding.

A writer actually posted that.

So, I'm, like, (to my friend), "Why is it so okay for writers today to just wave around gigantic banners about how stupid they are?"

I mean, could you imagine, back in the day, Fitzgerald and Hemingway having a chat about something like that? It might have gone something like this:

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: What ho, Ernest (not that I believe for a moment Fitzgerald would have said "what ho," but I need to find a book on how to write dialogue with snappy opening interjections. But I digress. Do over...) What ho, Ernest. Do you have any tips, any nuggets of wisdom, being the clever man that you are, as to how one actually goes about writing a story with a beginning, middle bits, and... an ending?

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: You're a douchebag, Scott.

Remember: if you are a murderer and are not doing anything at the moment, I will tweet daily tips on how to find me and kill me, and how to write stories with "middle bits" as well.