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.
