Fifteen years later, the problems with Curse of the Were-Weasel seem obvious. Not to hog all the glory, but the biggest single problem with Curse was me, and my insistence of trying to do this thing entirely with writers.
Huh? What? Who else would I have used?
Understand, this was one of the times when my background in music and theater really let me down. I didn’t understand it then: for something like this to work fiction writers need firm guidance and assertive direction. They need hard guidelines. They need a series bible.
I’d worked from rigid series bibles before and didn’t much like them. In fact, I’d written series bibles for other publishers and other projects and didn’t like them much, either. But for a project like this, they are a necessary evil. The “herding cats” metaphor is overused but in this case entirely apt. Writers—print fiction writers especially—don’t know how to improvise. They tend to be introverts. They don’t know how to work together as a part of a group, playing off each other, supporting each other, and riffing off each other’s contributions.
Fiction writers don’t know how to jam.
As a musician or someone doing improv theater, this is something you just sort of instinctively know and don’t give too much thought. You just know, when you ask a half-dozen musicians with whom you’re familiar to get together, what sort of instruments and skill levels they're likely to bring to the jam session and in which direction things are likely to go.
Ask six fiction writers to get together and "bring something to play," and they’ll show up with an electric guitar, a flugelhorn, a kalimba, a fish guiro, a set of bagpipes, and a basketball. Not even John Cage in his prime could have gotten something coherent out of that.
Maybe Peter Schickele could.
___________
So Curse of the Were-Weasel was launched in June of 2008, and as soon as the gate was opened, the cats all scattered and did their own things. It was confused, chaotic, inconsistent, and totally phase one of lumpy gravy. The lack of an overarching plot was crippling. The reader participation idea never worked at all. The concept of having weekly meetings in real time was the worst thing about it. Anyone who’s ever had to organize a Zoom or Skype meeting can imagine what that was like, especially given that Zoom and Skype hadn’t been invented yet.
In the end Henry Vogel and David Goodman staged a coup and tried to seize control of the thing, to impose some sense of direction, but it was probably too late. Vampires were introduced, in a controlled fashion and subject to restrictions similar to those that applied to our ALPS victims; they were now properly termed victim’s of “Stoker’s Disease” and Henry began to develop a nice romantic subplot involving a sexy female vampire named Michelle. Someday I’ll have to ask him why he keeps writing romantic heroines named “Michelle” into his stories, given that that isn’t his wife’s name. That’s probably a topic better saved for a private conversation.
An anti-ALPS element was introduced, in the form of one Reverend Riley and his fundamentalist followers. I wasn’t entirely happy with that as such characters tend to devolve into Cartoon Christians and become really ugly caricatures, so I tried to introduce a political angle, with the idea of “Dark Life” and a developing power struggle between the new breed of out-in-the-public-eye ALPS victims and the old-school cryptids who preferred to remain in the shadows. I figured the “Dark Life” characters would relish the power they accrued by staying hidden and therefore gravitate to Washington D.C. I had some interesting ideas for developing that.
But then the El Paso County coroner’s office called, to tell me my daughter’s body had been found, and I lost interest in pretty much everything for a long time after that.
___________
Fifteen years later, why is Curse of the Were-Weasel back on my mind? Because behind the scenes, Pete Wood and I have been having a long-running conversation on the future of both Tales from The Brahma and The Odin Chronicles. I think there are important lessons to be learned here from the failure of Curse of the Were-Weasel that can be applied moving forward. Dawn of Time worked because fiction writers understand the round-robin approach to group writing. “I’m going to write a chapter and end it with a cliff-hanger, and then it’s over to you to figure out how to get Dawn out of the mess I wrote her into!”
Fiction writers know that game. Most like to play it. And the writers working on Dawn of Time also benefited from knowing where the story ended. Dawn was always going to end up back where she began. Contradictory as it seems, on a project like this, writers benefit a lot from knowing which possible plot paths are already closed off and therefore not worth pursuing.
Those I think are the lessons to be learned from the failure of Curse of the Were-Weasel. If you’re going to try to create a multi-author multi-character multi-threaded tale—or for that matter, just to co-author a story with a good friend—remember entropy. Organization rarely develops spontaneously. The forces that produce chaos and nonsense are always much stronger. Put in the work ahead of time to map out an overarching plot structure. Define the outer limits of the world and the story and make sure your authors understand and agree to abide by them. (Nota bene to Pete Wood: Go back and re-read your own interview with David Gerrold, especially the parts about how hard it was to get Harlan Ellison to abide by the limits of the Star Trek world.) Plan an ending. Even if your story never gets to it, it really helps your writers to know the direction in which your story is trying to go.
Write the damned series bible.
In yesterday’s post I used the word “aleatoric,” which sent some people running to their dictionaries. The important thing to remember about using aleatory is that it’s not completely random. It’s introducing random elements and performer-decided real-time choices into a predefined structure, and if anything it requires putting in even more work up front to define that structure, so that the end result isn’t just incoherent noise.
Here endeth the lesson. Learn from my mistakes.
—Bruce Bethke
P.S. On a purely personal note: the lesson I learned from Curse of the Were-Weasel was that the titular were-weasel, Scott the Douchebag, was nowhere near as interesting to readers as I found him fun and interesting to write. The characters the readers liked and wanted to see more of were my throwaway romantic couple, Harald and Tina, who were only meant to appear in one story.
I’ll have to give some serious thought to what else they can do. I mean, besides have sex.
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