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Kitty’s Krueger’s Kitty-Kruegery Writing Tips
Meow meow meow this is Kitty Krueger!
I am not a writing instructor but I do like to sit in my litterbox sometimes, after sniffing catnip, and make up crazy adventures starring my dried up turds. If you are into making up poop adventures too than maybe I can help you have a better time by sharing some of my experience with you. “Every successful person creates with an audience of one in mind.” Kurt Vonnegut
First off, before you start writing make sure there is a story you really want to tell. Don’t worry about whether or not other people think the idea is cool. If you haven’t written anything in while, it’s a good idea to brush up on your basic writing skills by reading a book like The Elements of Style by White & Strunk. Some important things to keep in mind right off the bat, whether or not you read that book: avoid adjectives and adverbs, avoid passive sentences, show instead of tell, never stop to revise until your rough draft is done, and avoid purple prose.
"Great love defies even death." Lagos Egri’s premise for “Romeo & Juliet
Some may disagree but I have always felt that the premise is the meowinariest aspect when it comes to constructing a piece of fiction. The premise is like the heart of the story, the underlying force that is driving the story from beginning to end. An example would be like in a Nightmare on Elm Street, the premise of that is like “tough survivory girls can survive anything if they are totally hardcore”. If you recall a Nightmare On Elm Street you can see that this premise is illustrated repeatedly throughout the story, Freddy Krueger is a spooky killer with monster powers and he kills badboys like Rod Lane like it was nothing but Nancy keeps fucking him up because she is a badass! I would imagine the premise of a film such as the Kurt Russell/Goldie Hawn classic “Overboard” would be something like “true love conquers class differences and tricky amnesia related rapes.” Obviously the premise is tied in greatly to the protagonist of your story. If Nancy was just a slutty whore your premise would have been totally different. But this is totally confusing me. Let’s say I take this dump I just took and roll it in litter. This piece of shit is a dog rockstar named Barky McMeow. He just moved into a shitty house in Dayton, Ohio to lay low for a while. His face is horribly scarred because his wife threw boiling porridge in his face and then blew her brains out all over their wedding album because she couldn’t take Barky’s infidelities.
So Barky is super guilty and really wants to redeem himself somehow. The guilt hurts so much that he would rather die than feel it. So then my premise would be like “a dog will give up anything to redeem himself.” But then I thought since Barky is basically a selfish person this premise is wrong, he just wants to feel better and redemption for him will be like a fix so the premise is more like, “a dog will do anything to avoid pain.”
“I live and die by the outline,” Charles Edward Pogue (The Fly, Psycho 3)
You will hear all kinds of things about outlines. Stephen King supposedly hates them and writes shit straight off the top of his head with no plan. Patricia Highsmith only liked to know the first two acts in advance and left the third act to appear to her as a surprise. Whatever you decide I can tell you from experience that using an outline is just easier, I’m sure people like Stephen King do outline but have written for such a long time that they do it automatically, it’s like breathing to them. As a beginning writer having an outline is just like the map that helped you through the first level of “Legend of Zelda” just to orient you to the gameplay. The basic three act outline is simple and can be illustrated this way using my own film “The Vespernariot”: 1. Take a hungry British fellow on a pink Vespa scooter, Milly Brittles, who has just rode away from the drive thru window of Wendy’s with a classic single stack burger, plain with no ketchup, pickles, or cheese. Mean Ghazarian and his gang of bikers are hungry too so they surround Milly and steal his burger. 2. Mean Ghazarian is about to drive away but Milly’s British pride forces him to call Ghazarian a “crude vagabond”, so Ghazarian uses his meat pounder to flatten Milly together with his scooter. 3. Milly wakes up combined with his Vespa into a cybernetically enhanced scooter/human hybrid now known as the “Vespernariot”. The Vespernariot tracks down Ghazarian and his biker gang and fights them in an all out street brawl. At the end Ghazarian is ironically flattened together with his Suzuki Ninja motorcycle leaving things open for “The Vespernariot 2: The Ghazarinarian”. As you can see I was able to plot a fairly simple story there using three basic acts.
The intro (set up conflict): We meet hungry Milly Brittles and his burger. Ghazarian is hungry too, mean and hungry. (Premise: Hunger defies death). Rising action/random gayness: Ghazarian gets tough on Milly. The burger is eaten. Increasing tension. Mean words are tossed about. Milly is beaten to death. Anal climax… Conclusion/cumshot: The Vespernariot rises. Ghazarian and his gang are destroyed. The Vespernariot’s hunger for vengeance is satiated. Here is the outline for my story about Barky McMeow, “The Barkening Meow”. 1. Barky McMeow befriends his roly-poly neighbor Boobs Peterson. Barky is dismayed to find himself caught up in a dilemma when he spies Boobs’s wife, Pussywillow getting banged by professional baseball player Pete Rose (story is set whenever Pete Rose was young and super awesome not old). But this dilemma is good for Barky because he could stop the affair and fix Boobs’s marriage and it would be like penance for the bad things he done to his own wife. 2. Barky attempts to break up the affair but all reasonable attempts fail and only make things worse. Barky gets into a bat fight with Pete Rose and Pussywillow’s head is accidentally smashed in. Weeks later Boobs buys a pistol to kill himself with and leaves a message on Barky’s answering machine to say bye. 3. Barky rushes to Boobs’s house to save him and calls the cops. Pete Rose also shows up wielding a chainsaw intent on killing Barky for what happened to Pussywillow. Boobs blows Pete Rose’s brains out just as the cops burst in. In the panic the cops open fire on Boobs but Barky jumps in front just in time, knocking the pistol out of Boob’s hand and taking all the bullets himself. Barky dies and he is free from having to feel guilty anymore. So as you can see my outline grew from the character of Barky and the premise I formed. Just having him interact with any random characters, already knowing the premise I wanted to prove, was bound to lead to a story. There is no limit to how elaborate you can make your outline. Stories are made of scenes; each scene has its own three part structure, beginning, middle, and end. For short stories I often like to break it up into nine scenes. Three for each act. Some people like long second acts. The third act is usually the shortest and should manage to leave few loose ends. The Lord of The Rings part 3 has a super long third act with people being lame and hobbits making out and Viggo Mortensen getting banged. It fucking sucks!
Consider the third act of “Unbreakable” when Bruce Willis embraces being a superhero and fights that serial killer. That is the most compact and intense sequence of the film and all the elements introduced by the opening acts are tied together neatly, including the final twist at the very end. Some people find it helps to keep a copy of their outline on hand to jot down random notes near where they should occur in the planned story.
“Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing down on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.” John Steinbeck
Human beings are born with a form of extrasensory perception in their inner butt. This sense allows them to distinguish between a fart and a shit, allowing them to safely fart in public without shitting their pants. Sometimes this sense fails and people shit their pants. When you write you should always be trying to shit your pants! Don’t clean it up until later! Once you do have your rough draft done put it away for as long as it takes to forget it, so you can read it again with fresh eyes. Here are some things to look for when revising: They’re/their/there It’s/its Your/you’re Are/our Lets/let’s To/too/two Who’s/whose Lay/lie Cut as much as you can from your story. Be ruthless. Sentence fragments are usually okay if you meant them for effect.
There are a billion other things you can do before and after reading a story, crazy paradigms, character arcs, crazy research and details, crazy stuff but the most important advice to follow is what Robert Heinlein said:
1. You must write. 2. You must finish what you write. 3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order. 4. You must put the work on the market. 5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
Even if your goal isn’t selling stories it’s important to have something done, something with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Something with a title you can print out and make marks on or mail to someone. Everything else can be fixed in revision or the next story you write. Remember that even the greatest writers wrote hundreds of short stories before writing anything that was worth reading. Writing takes practice, too many people think you can just come right out and write the best story ever and get the Bram Stoker award. Just write a story and don’t be all serious about it. You don’t need an excuse or crazy life experience. Good writers write good stories about the lamest, shittiest things like “a&p” by John Updike is about a supermarket checkout but he is a super famous writer. I hope some of my ideas on writing can help you with your own stories. Have fun, see you in your nightmeows meow ha ha! Kitty Krueger
Meow meow meow this is Kitty Krueger!
I am not a writing instructor but I do like to sit in my litterbox sometimes, after sniffing catnip, and make up crazy adventures starring my dried up turds. If you are into making up poop adventures too than maybe I can help you have a better time by sharing some of my experience with you. “Every successful person creates with an audience of one in mind.” Kurt Vonnegut
First off, before you start writing make sure there is a story you really want to tell. Don’t worry about whether or not other people think the idea is cool. If you haven’t written anything in while, it’s a good idea to brush up on your basic writing skills by reading a book like The Elements of Style by White & Strunk. Some important things to keep in mind right off the bat, whether or not you read that book: avoid adjectives and adverbs, avoid passive sentences, show instead of tell, never stop to revise until your rough draft is done, and avoid purple prose.
"Great love defies even death." Lagos Egri’s premise for “Romeo & Juliet
Some may disagree but I have always felt that the premise is the meowinariest aspect when it comes to constructing a piece of fiction. The premise is like the heart of the story, the underlying force that is driving the story from beginning to end. An example would be like in a Nightmare on Elm Street, the premise of that is like “tough survivory girls can survive anything if they are totally hardcore”. If you recall a Nightmare On Elm Street you can see that this premise is illustrated repeatedly throughout the story, Freddy Krueger is a spooky killer with monster powers and he kills badboys like Rod Lane like it was nothing but Nancy keeps fucking him up because she is a badass! I would imagine the premise of a film such as the Kurt Russell/Goldie Hawn classic “Overboard” would be something like “true love conquers class differences and tricky amnesia related rapes.” Obviously the premise is tied in greatly to the protagonist of your story. If Nancy was just a slutty whore your premise would have been totally different. But this is totally confusing me. Let’s say I take this dump I just took and roll it in litter. This piece of shit is a dog rockstar named Barky McMeow. He just moved into a shitty house in Dayton, Ohio to lay low for a while. His face is horribly scarred because his wife threw boiling porridge in his face and then blew her brains out all over their wedding album because she couldn’t take Barky’s infidelities.
So Barky is super guilty and really wants to redeem himself somehow. The guilt hurts so much that he would rather die than feel it. So then my premise would be like “a dog will give up anything to redeem himself.” But then I thought since Barky is basically a selfish person this premise is wrong, he just wants to feel better and redemption for him will be like a fix so the premise is more like, “a dog will do anything to avoid pain.”
“I live and die by the outline,” Charles Edward Pogue (The Fly, Psycho 3)
You will hear all kinds of things about outlines. Stephen King supposedly hates them and writes shit straight off the top of his head with no plan. Patricia Highsmith only liked to know the first two acts in advance and left the third act to appear to her as a surprise. Whatever you decide I can tell you from experience that using an outline is just easier, I’m sure people like Stephen King do outline but have written for such a long time that they do it automatically, it’s like breathing to them. As a beginning writer having an outline is just like the map that helped you through the first level of “Legend of Zelda” just to orient you to the gameplay. The basic three act outline is simple and can be illustrated this way using my own film “The Vespernariot”: 1. Take a hungry British fellow on a pink Vespa scooter, Milly Brittles, who has just rode away from the drive thru window of Wendy’s with a classic single stack burger, plain with no ketchup, pickles, or cheese. Mean Ghazarian and his gang of bikers are hungry too so they surround Milly and steal his burger. 2. Mean Ghazarian is about to drive away but Milly’s British pride forces him to call Ghazarian a “crude vagabond”, so Ghazarian uses his meat pounder to flatten Milly together with his scooter. 3. Milly wakes up combined with his Vespa into a cybernetically enhanced scooter/human hybrid now known as the “Vespernariot”. The Vespernariot tracks down Ghazarian and his biker gang and fights them in an all out street brawl. At the end Ghazarian is ironically flattened together with his Suzuki Ninja motorcycle leaving things open for “The Vespernariot 2: The Ghazarinarian”. As you can see I was able to plot a fairly simple story there using three basic acts.
The intro (set up conflict): We meet hungry Milly Brittles and his burger. Ghazarian is hungry too, mean and hungry. (Premise: Hunger defies death). Rising action/random gayness: Ghazarian gets tough on Milly. The burger is eaten. Increasing tension. Mean words are tossed about. Milly is beaten to death. Anal climax… Conclusion/cumshot: The Vespernariot rises. Ghazarian and his gang are destroyed. The Vespernariot’s hunger for vengeance is satiated. Here is the outline for my story about Barky McMeow, “The Barkening Meow”. 1. Barky McMeow befriends his roly-poly neighbor Boobs Peterson. Barky is dismayed to find himself caught up in a dilemma when he spies Boobs’s wife, Pussywillow getting banged by professional baseball player Pete Rose (story is set whenever Pete Rose was young and super awesome not old). But this dilemma is good for Barky because he could stop the affair and fix Boobs’s marriage and it would be like penance for the bad things he done to his own wife. 2. Barky attempts to break up the affair but all reasonable attempts fail and only make things worse. Barky gets into a bat fight with Pete Rose and Pussywillow’s head is accidentally smashed in. Weeks later Boobs buys a pistol to kill himself with and leaves a message on Barky’s answering machine to say bye. 3. Barky rushes to Boobs’s house to save him and calls the cops. Pete Rose also shows up wielding a chainsaw intent on killing Barky for what happened to Pussywillow. Boobs blows Pete Rose’s brains out just as the cops burst in. In the panic the cops open fire on Boobs but Barky jumps in front just in time, knocking the pistol out of Boob’s hand and taking all the bullets himself. Barky dies and he is free from having to feel guilty anymore. So as you can see my outline grew from the character of Barky and the premise I formed. Just having him interact with any random characters, already knowing the premise I wanted to prove, was bound to lead to a story. There is no limit to how elaborate you can make your outline. Stories are made of scenes; each scene has its own three part structure, beginning, middle, and end. For short stories I often like to break it up into nine scenes. Three for each act. Some people like long second acts. The third act is usually the shortest and should manage to leave few loose ends. The Lord of The Rings part 3 has a super long third act with people being lame and hobbits making out and Viggo Mortensen getting banged. It fucking sucks!
Consider the third act of “Unbreakable” when Bruce Willis embraces being a superhero and fights that serial killer. That is the most compact and intense sequence of the film and all the elements introduced by the opening acts are tied together neatly, including the final twist at the very end. Some people find it helps to keep a copy of their outline on hand to jot down random notes near where they should occur in the planned story.
“Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing down on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.” John Steinbeck
Human beings are born with a form of extrasensory perception in their inner butt. This sense allows them to distinguish between a fart and a shit, allowing them to safely fart in public without shitting their pants. Sometimes this sense fails and people shit their pants. When you write you should always be trying to shit your pants! Don’t clean it up until later! Once you do have your rough draft done put it away for as long as it takes to forget it, so you can read it again with fresh eyes. Here are some things to look for when revising: They’re/their/there It’s/its Your/you’re Are/our Lets/let’s To/too/two Who’s/whose Lay/lie Cut as much as you can from your story. Be ruthless. Sentence fragments are usually okay if you meant them for effect.
There are a billion other things you can do before and after reading a story, crazy paradigms, character arcs, crazy research and details, crazy stuff but the most important advice to follow is what Robert Heinlein said:
1. You must write. 2. You must finish what you write. 3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order. 4. You must put the work on the market. 5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
Even if your goal isn’t selling stories it’s important to have something done, something with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Something with a title you can print out and make marks on or mail to someone. Everything else can be fixed in revision or the next story you write. Remember that even the greatest writers wrote hundreds of short stories before writing anything that was worth reading. Writing takes practice, too many people think you can just come right out and write the best story ever and get the Bram Stoker award. Just write a story and don’t be all serious about it. You don’t need an excuse or crazy life experience. Good writers write good stories about the lamest, shittiest things like “a&p” by John Updike is about a supermarket checkout but he is a super famous writer. I hope some of my ideas on writing can help you with your own stories. Have fun, see you in your nightmeows meow ha ha! Kitty Krueger
