Tag Archives: writing

How My Make-Believe Daughter Got a Book Published

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I love all the kids in my debut novel Party, of course. And there is a little bit of me in each one of them. But I feel the most for Morrigan. My heart breaks for her.

I think it’s because she was based on a character I created who was an imagined child of mine.

Yeah. True story.

This is a promo mockup for the Party feature film, now called BUTTERFLIES.

I was dating someone and got to thinking about what our kids might be like. I smiled as I thought about it, and started writing a short little scene. In the scene, our kid–an only child, by the way!–was a teenager. A girl. And she and I were on our back patio having a conversation.

As happens often when I write, I lost track entirely of the story and just surfed the wave of inspiration. I felt invigorated when I was finished, and CTRL+HOME’d back to the top of the doc and started reading.

My jaw slowly dropped.

Our kid was in bad shape. I didn’t even know I was writing it like that. Far from being some tender, bucolic scene of heartfelt emotion, the scene was dark and broody and kind of unpleasant.

Worst — I didn’t come off too well in it.

That was the day I knew the relationship wasn’t going to go the distance. I was right. (Thankfully for both of us.)

So Morrigan was in many ways the first character to come to life in PARTY. When I had the idea to throw a bunch of dissimilar kids into a situation and see what happened, I knew the girl in that scene was going to be a part of it.

None of the actual words in that scene ended up in the published novel, but that’s her, no question.

Fan art commission of Morry.

Morrigan just wants to be seen. In particular by her dad. I know that feeling from both sides of it now. I try to remind myself of what happens to kids who get dismissed by their parents, and work harder at not letting that happen in my house.

Morrigan’s a good kid at heart. She really is.

I’m excited to see where she ends up in my new serialized novel, FADE INTO YOU, in which I pluck the characters from Party and plant them into the world of Zero – early 1990’s Phoenix in stead of early 2000’s Santa Barbara. She won’t be exactly the same — none of the characters will — but she’ll still be Morry, that sassy little brat who desperately seeks a connection to people.

So desperately it gets her into trouble from time to time,

But then, that’s where good stories come from, isn’t it?

If you’d like an e-book copy of Party, just click over to this page of the website, and I’ll email you one right away!

And if you want to learn more about the exclusive serial FADE INTO YOU, head over to patreon.com/tomleveen.

Talk to you soon,
take care,
~ Tom

The Magic of…Gilligan’s Island

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I found myself thinking about Gilligan’s Island this afternoon (for no sensible reason I can discern), and remembering watching the endless re-runs on television as a kid.

Being little, it honestly never occurred to me that they were somewhere on a sound stage in Hollywood. It was Gilligan’s Island; they’d film it on an island, naturally.

Because when you’re that age, whatever is presented to you just is. Just like I never noticed the Brady siblings had no toilet in their awkwardly-shared bathroom.

As a parent now, particularly of my nine-year-old son, I am re-noticing the things that he does . . . well, notice. We have talked more than once (before scary movies, in particular) that everything on screen is just pretend, and he always seemed to accept that. I don’t think he believes that there’s a real King Kong wandering about.

It’s the job of storytellers like me to make our worlds as real to you as that desert island was to me, no matter how old our readers or viewers. It’s no small task, writing and crafting stories well enough that you can get utterly lost in them, lose track of time, or even–from time to time–gloss over a few hiccups. (How did Ginger and the Howells store all their clothes on that tiny boat?)

With every new story, it’s a new challenge. “Worlds” aren’t just about fantasy or science fiction or horror; Zero’s 1990s-era Phoenix is just as much a world as Tanin’s magical, monster-infested land of Kassia. Each time I set out to tell a new story, I’m hoping to create a place and time that feel authentic to my readers. To forget the reality of that sound stage and just enjoy a new adventure.

There are so many more worlds to create. I think I’ll get started!

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…

Midsommar: A great start that gets gory and infuriating

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A young couple and their friends travel to Sweden to visit a rural mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat devolves into a violent and bizarre competition at the hands of adherents to an ancient belief system.

 

I watched director Ari Aster’s Hereditary about a year ago, and it still haunts me. Not everyone had my reaction, and that’s fine, but I’m telling you, that was one disturbing damn film. I say that in a good way.

 

So when Midsommar came out, I hesitated; I wasn’t sure I could handle another Aster outing. The film was released in the golden days of 2019, and I decided to watch at last during October 2020, because, what’s a little horror movie compared to reality, amiright?

 

And to be completely transparent, I have not yet seen it. Not all of it. I stopped about halfway because it was getting dark and my stomach was starting to revolt on me as the film gradually got creepier and more gory.

 

I saw enough of it, though, to issue one blistering critique that ruined the film long before it hit Peak Gore.

 

The script of and performances in Midsommar at the top of the show are hyper-realistic and empathetic. We’ve all been on one side or the other of the opening phone calls. Then sudden grief hits, and it hurts to watch, because we’ve been there, too. Aster knows real grief and trauma isn’t, ironically, “Hollywood.” It is real and discordant and no one is pretty when they cry, not really. At the start, the film does a great job of “talk about anything other than what we’re all thinking,” and is worth studying because it is so thoroughly human (or perhaps so thoroughly American?). The cinematography is fantastic too (or at least, has been fantastic up to half way…)

 

A New York Times review pooh-pooh’d the performance of Florence Pugh, who plays the lead as Dani, a twenty-something suffering from profound depression long before additional trauma crushes her spirit. The review reduces her to a “walking wound” after the terrible tragedy in her family that opens the film. I see the reviewer’s criticism, but disagree—as someone who struggles with depression and PTSD, I felt the depiction was spot-on.

 

So far so good, eh? Wait for it.

 

At about the hour mark, not even half way into the film, things get dark and gruesome. It was appalling and shocking and effective, all the things a sequence like that should be in a horror movie.

 

But the aftermath of this event, which gruesomely kills two people, consists of two of the male leads getting into an argument over their . . . dissertations.

 

I just want you to picture being out of the country on holiday. Hell, let’s even say you’re travelling for school, for a college degree of some kind. One day into your trip, two people are killed and the folks you’re living with all say, “Oh, sure, did we not tell you? Our bad. This is our way.”

 

Would you stick around to “study” this group some more?

 

The scene immediately after these deaths is . . . um . . . unbelievable? That’s seems too gentle a word. Like, no way in hell would these two react the way they do, and the script hasn’t given us any reason to think they would. The motivations here aren’t just weak, they are nonexistent for any reasonable human being

 

Literally: “That was really, really shocking. I’m trying to keep an open mind, though,” one says.

 

Yeah, no, bro. You fucking run like your hair’s on fire.

 

So at this point, it’s kind of hard to stay tuned in. The morbid curiosity of the horror movie fan is about all the juice I have to keep going. I quit watching about twenty minutes later.

 

Listen—sometimes people do stupid shit, thus, it’s okay for your characters to do stupid shit. An astute reader, as I like to call them, pointed out that in my novel Sick, for instance, which is entirely set inside a high school where a small group of plucky survivors (sound familiar?) try to escape to a Safe Place during a Zombie Apocalypse . . . not a single one of them ever thinks to make a try for the nurse’s office.

 

That’s sort of a mistake, I suppose. If so, it’s a mistake based entirely on the fact that in four years of high school, I never once went to the nurse’s office. I assume we had one, but I swear to God, I don’t know for sure. So yeah, maybe an oversight on my part as the author, but it could be argued in context of the story that there was no need for them to try such a risky gambit. Still . . . yeah, someone should have at least pointed out the option.

 

So that was an oversight on my part. Granted.

 

The choice made at 1:23:00 of Midsommar is not a mistake.

 

It’s a choice, and it falls so flat that I can barely stand it. It’s infuriating, really, because I’m a big fan of Hereditary (in that it freaked me out so much I’ll never watch it again. That’s high praise). While the script sets up that our intrepid Americans are in fact doctoral candidates, it in no way emphasizes the great lengths to which they’ll go to get their “scoop” story for that dissertation. Furthermore, even if the script had tried to emphasize such a thing, the fact that their reaction to the horror unfolding before them is to argue about those dissertations rather than saying, “Bro, where’s the key to the car?!” is unforgiveable from a character-development standpoint. I would be happy to go along with this premise if the script had established just how critical obtaining these degrees was to the characters, but it doesn’t.

 

Of late, and I may come to regret this, I’ve tried as much as possible to insist on realism in my horror. When I’m writing or building an outline, I try to stop frequently and ask, “Now what would someone really do here?” You can motivate a character to do just about anything, and then come up with a really fun way to prevent them from getting their goal—that’s the whole point, in fact. Midsommar does not take this approach at all. It pits graphic violence against, of all things, academia, and it just does not sell for me.

 

Let your characters be real people who have real reaction commensurate with their background. Jack Bauer and Rambo and whoever else aren’t going to have a panic attack when they shoot someone. But I would. You would, too (one hopes). Those reactions are commensurate with our experience. So if you’re going to do something that would strike most people as odd, be sure it’s backed up in the character’s backstory somewhere.

 

Don’t be afraid to ask open-ended questions of your characters when you come to these choices. You may discover some rich gems hiding. I am working on a novel that I can’t talk about right now, but: in the story, this main character was knowingly entering into a situation where she may be called upon to take a life. Maybe several. How the hell do I motivate that? What would make a person do that? What has happened in her past to make her . . . ohhhh! GOT IT!

 See what I mean? I made a brand new discovery about her history that gives the novel a whole new resonance.

Do this, please, whenever your can. I don’t mind mindless horror from time to time, it has its place. So does mindless YA, mindless romance, mindless mystery. Swell. But if you’re setting out to make something else, which Midsommar is clearly trying to do, then for God’s sake, motivate those characters to justify the stupid shit they do on the page.

Don’t Lose It

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5 a.m.

Kid Noisestm wake me up. I can’t quite fall back to sleep. Start obsessing over this novel I really want to write. Something new and different for me. But the more I study it, the farther away it gets. The character’s all wrong, the plot won’t work, the structure is wonky.

And in this half-asleep mode, this near-darkness . . . I see my protagonist. I see her dad, then her mom.

I see the weapons.

Now I’m at a critical juncture: burrow deeper into the covers and let sleep take over, or get up and at least take some notes?

I get up.

Two single-spaced pages later, I have the intro to my new novel. Everything I need is now in place, and I can begin writing in earnest. I’ll probably have a draft by the end of February.

When that Thing comes to you early in the morning or in the middle of the night . . . don’t lose it. An idea for an improved golf club, the next great Widget, the opening to your novel. Whatever it is, get up and don’t lose it.

Because we both know if you say, “I’ll remember,” you won’t. Get up or stop whatever it is you’re doing and get that thing down.

Stephen King talks about The Muse in On Writing. The Muse is not something you wait around for; you just do the work. But when you just do the work, sometimes The Muse does show up and gives you a little gift. Like two single-spaced pages.

Don’t lose it.

Thanks for being here! Take care, and may you be happy.

~ Tom

 

Why is writing endings so difficult?

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Endings are tough on writers and readers alike. For authors of course it’s hard to know if we’ve nailed an ending; and for readers, we can all name at least a few endings that left us a little cold. (I can name one right now that I think I shouted, “WHAT?!” and then shook my head for the last page or two. No, I will not name it here. Ask me at Ace or Phoenix ComiCon.)

On the other hand, we’ve all read endings that really soared too; that left us weeping sadly (not me!!!) or weeping joyfully (also not me!!!). But as an author, how do you take a reader there?

I’ll go into more detail on this in a new project I’m working on, but for today, let’s stick with the following:

1. The protagonist needs to change. This is all but an absolute requirement, and I’d say it’s pretty much a requirement of all genre fiction. It needn’t be the basis of the novel, but do give us some sense that the hero is not who she was at the beginning.

2. The ending needs to be in context of the storyworld. I talk a bit about this in my new book How To Write Your Novel By Watching Movies First, which you should totally get right now, but the short of it is this: If you’ve presented us with a novel set in the real world, then there better not be any aliens showing up at the end (unless that was the inevitable thing we knew about at the start). You opened your book with several promises: this is the genre, this/these are the hero/es, here’s the story problem. Deviating from any of these at the end is not going to endear you to readers.

This brings us to twists and surprise endings, but we’ll come back to those another time. Right now, just know that you’ve established a premise in the novel’s opening pages; the ending should be the payoff.

3. Word choice and cadence or rhythm matter. Remember how Morgan Freeman said, “I hope,” at the end of The Shawshank Redemption movie? It’s the same last words of the novella. Now imagine him saying, “I have hope.”

Ehhh . . . it lacks somehow, doesn’t it? I think it’s because “I hope” is active; it has momentum and breathes on its one. “I have hope,” while not a bad sentence and is still true in the context of the story, sounds like something possessed; something inanimate like a pencil or a phone. “I hope” has a different cadence than “I have hope,” and is by far the stronger choice. So sound out those last few sentences, and make sure you’re writing and punctuating them the way you hear them out loud.

4. What have you liked about other novels? Think of the top three or more books that left you a little breathless or somehow emotional, and study how that author did it. You can’t (usually) rip off an exact ending of course, but ask yourself why a particular ending had the impact on you that it did. Then go back and compare those notes to your novel. You might discover something.

Good luck sticking the landing on those endings! It can be challenge, but it’s a good feeling when you know you’ve got something. Keep writing!

(And if you liked this post, please share it; if you want to learn more, drop me a line!)

 

Author Visits Santa Barbara High School, Inspiration for First Novel

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Author Visits Santa Barbara High School, Inspiration for First Novel

Driving out of Santa Barbara on the last leg of his honeymoon, then-unpublished writer Tom Leveen suddenly shouted, “Write this down!” His new wife, Joy, already accustomed to such outbursts of inspiration, pulled a pen and notebook out of her bag. Tom dictated a carefully worded paragraph about a girl named Beckett, whose mother had recently passed away. Beckett is certain no one in school even knows her name—unaware of the boy who’s been crushing on her for years, and unaware of the drama and triumph of the night that lays ahead.

That paragraph never made it into Leveen’s debut young adult novel, Party (Random House Children’s Books, 2010) but the character of Beckett did. So did Leveen’s thrall with Santa Barbara. He now returns to the city for a short visit, and his first actual trip to Santa Barbara High School, where he’ll be meeting with students and teaching classes on writing.

“Santa Barbara has this aura that I fell in love with immediately,” Leveen says. “My wife went to college here, and took me to all her favorite hangouts during the time we spent here on our honeymoon: East Beach Grill, the Mission, Coffee Cat, Shoreline Beach, Super Cucas. They all ended up in the novel, which didn’t get published until about five years after I dictated that first paragraph to my wife.”

Party is geared toward high school students, but has enjoyed broad crossover appeal to adults who avidly read YA fiction. Leveen’s novel is only eleven chapters, but each is told entirely by a different character, so the true motivations and stories of each of the eleven protagonists can’t be known until the book’s end.

While the setting is, in fact, a high school graduation party near Shoreline Beach, the themes are anything but celebratory.

“A racially motivated fistfight anchors the main plot,” Leveen says, “but there are subplots that orbit around that. One of the main themes is ‘say words,’ that if these characters had all talked to one another instead of making judgements or assumptions, none of the conflict in the novel would have happened. It turns out that this theme, particularly about race and religion as it appears in the book, has become more important for teens to talk about these days, not less.”

Several aspects of the story are based on real-life events, Leveen says, including the hate-crime murder of a Sikh in his native state of Arizona following 9/11, as well as the story of Pat Tillman, a football player who gave up his shot at the NFL to join the military.

And for those who like a little romance to temper the drama, Leveen promises there is also a very sweet romantic plot about Beckett and her secret admirer.

Leveen will visit Santa Barbara High School on October 13, 2016 for private classes. For more information or to set up a book talk, class, or interview, Tom is on Facebook at /AuthorTomLeveen, and Twitter at @tomleveen.

 

Han Solo Is Missing

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I’m taking a creative nonfiction class from one of the masters in the field, Lee Gutkind. Here is my first assignment: A scene. That’s it. Those were our instructions. Write a scene about something that happened between the times our class met, maximum 250 words. Here’s what I came up with. Enjoy.

Han Solo disappeared at approximately 6:15 a.m. Mountain Time. Considering he was encased in plastic carbonite at the time, it seemed unlikely he vacated the home under his own power.

The father figure in this tragic scenario was visibly more shaken than the youngster to whom Mr. Solo belonged.

“When’s the last time you saw it?” Dad asked, teeth grinding. The Lego set had been a birthday gift to Toby, five years old for no longer than a week.

“I don’t know,” replied Toby.

“Did you play with him with Grandma last night?”

“No.”

“With Mommy?”

“No!”

“Well then where did you—okay. Let’s start over.”

“He’s gone,” Toby explained patiently.

“Yes,” said Dad. “I see that. But I highly doubt someone broke into the house undetected for the sole purpose of stealing Lego Han Solo.”

“He’s gone.”

Dad rubbed his face, held up his hands, and announced, “You know what? We’ll look again tonight after sch—”

“Here he is!” said Toby, reaching under a cabinet and proudly displaying Mr. Solo, still encased in his plastic carbonite.

Problem solved. And yet, Dad’s relief was slow in coming; how had Solo managed to get himself under there in the first place, and how to prevent it in the future?

Suspicion for the kidnapping currently rests on the dog.

 

How To Write Awesome Dialogue!

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dialogue front cover

Available now from Amazon on Kindle or paperback!

You’ve taken (or wanted to take) Tom’s energetic, unforgettable class on dialogue; now for the first time, here’s one place where all the collected advice, tips, and tricks is found! Bringing 22 years of experience as an actor and director in live theatre to the table, How To Write Awesome Dialogue! walks you through plot, conflict, and character notes to give you a firm foundation upon which to build better and best dialogue for your fiction or scripts. Don’t miss it!

That Thing You Do

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Just in case you didn’t hear me the first time, let me reiterate and post it for all the world to see:

That thing you do? That thing that actually gets you excited to wake up on certain mornings? That thing that makes you lose track of time in the best possible way?

You get to do it. You deserve to do it. Provided it’s not a three-state killing spree or some similar hobby that breaks the laws of man and gods…you get to do it.

Particularly if you live in the U.S., or any other industrialized nation. Obviously there are people struggling — trust me, I know — but the vast majority of us have roofs, food, and clothing. If basic survival is not a daily issue for you (and if you really take stock, it really probably isn’t), then you have time to do that Thing You Do.

Do not listen to anyone who tells you it’s stupid. Or you can’t. Or you suck. Do it anyway.

The trick is to work with the people in your life to whom you are “beholden.” A spouse and/or kids, for example. Your Thing may not get to come first on the week’s agenda. That’s okay. But work with those people and carve out that time. That Thing You Do makes you who you are, and you’re no good to those other people if you’re not the best You that you can be. (Someone told me that once. It helped a lot.)

Writing poetry, writing fiction, playing guitar, kicking the ball around, gardening, walking the dog, meditation, martial arts, knitting, cooking…anything that makes you the best person you can be, you deserve to do it. All people do…we just happen to live in a nation where it’s largely possible, and the only things really keeping us back are our own fears or resistance to talking to our loved one about it.

It might be an hour a week, it might be an hour a month. But you deserve it. (So do those other people!) Talk to them, keep talking to them, work something out.

You’re only going around once. Do Your Thing. When you do, it makes the world a better place.

I for one could use the world to be a better place. How about you?

 

YA Villainy!

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Guy Montag: villain and hero.
Tom Leveen: …uh, depends who you ask.

 

Are fictional characters held to a different standard than real life people?

I’m working on this YA contemporary novel, the longest I’ve ever written as a first draft. And there’s a character who, should I be so fortunate to publish the novel, will doubtless be decried as a villain. Rightfully so; the character does some pretty awful things by anyone’s standard.

But it got me thinking.

I try hard not to judge my characters. I try hard to give them concrete, sympathetic motivations for even their most grievous sins. Most readers and reviewers … (who am I kidding, I’ll just call them reviewers)…realize this. They might rail against the characters’ choices, to which I say, huzzah! Tear ’em apart. Reviewers are perfectly free to judge my characters. They are also free to judge my writing.

It’s when they judge me as a human being – based on my fiction – that I get a little, shall we say, nettled.

But I digress!

Remember that bad guys rarely think they’re doing bad things. If I told you a certain man was loyal, peace-seeking, and perhaps even ambitious, you might assume he’s a Good Guy. Ambition can be a little tricky, but properly managed, can certainly be a boon.

Except I just described Darth Vader. BOOM! Lightsaber-drop!

I mean, really — in parts 4, 5, and 6 (the ones that matter. Snap!) we have something of a tragic figure in Vader. The point, though, is he’s not out trying to rule the galaxy for the hell of it. He believes in his cause. He is utterly loyal (to a fault) to his mentor, the Emperor. He tells Luke they can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy, and I think he really wants that. That is seeking peace. How he goes about these goals, of course, becomes the issue.

So here I am with this teenage protagonist who commits horrific crimes. Is he a Bad Guy? Is he redeemable? Should readers and reviewers judge him, and if so, by what measure?

Are fictional characters held to a different standard than real life people? Should they be?

Some reviewers have criticized Anthony, or Morrigan, or Beckett’s mother in Party. Some have torn the literary flesh from Chad and Brian in Sick. Some have dismissed Tyler in manicpixiedreamgirl.  And . . . some of these reviews have been spot-on. Can’t lie about that. I’ve learned a lot from them. Others . . . well, others have frankly been pretty senseless, and a very few have attacked me, personally. But that’s a blog (or pending libel lawsuit) for another time. I’ll get more of these come August when Random is released, I’m sure; but I hope what happens more often is conversation.

I write these characters for a reason, and it’s never to be an asshole. It is to make investigations into who we all are as people, and it is to start conversations. I write edgy YA fiction, yo.  It’s been broughten! I wouldn’t be doing my job if everyone was sweetness and light on every page.

I wouldn’t be being honest.

But most readers understand that. The point here is that fictional bad guys (and, often, good guys) are prone to the same errors in judgement, petty squabbles, and rash decisions we all are. No one is all good or all bad in reality, and neither in fiction. Let your good guys have flaws, and let your bad guys have admirable qualities. I think this is the beginning of what is hoped to be “multi-dimensional characters.”

It’s not your job as the author to beg forgiveness for the actions of your villains — in-book, or in real life. Let them do their thing, and let the good guys do theirs, and most importantly, make sure they collide in the middle.

Cool? Cool.