This course is going to be called Write Like A Gangster. I figured out through the course of my career so far that a lot of people will tell you so many hard, fast rules of what you should and shouldn’t do when you’re writing. I don’t believe in those. I’ve broken the rules too much (and it worked) for me to ever toss out a tool I might need as a writer. So, having been raised by gangsters when I was young, in neighborhoods surrounded by that sort of lifestyle, I decided to put together a lecture called Write Like A Gangster. I gave that lecture at a convention called Tremendicon in 2019. It was the first time I had taught in front of a class the art of writing, the mechanics of writing. It went so well and I felt so alive. I realized that, as well as writing and selling books, I also needed to be teaching. So I put together the curriculum for a dream class I would teach. This is that class. Welcome to Write Like A Gangster.    

Hey, ho, let’s go!

“This is not happening. This is not happening.” She looked at the doors and shook her head. “I can’t do that. I can’t go in there.” She knew there was no one to beg, but still she begged for any other way to go. She looked at the shadows cast by the beings slapping and thudding against the windows and knew any of them would chew off a limb to be where she was right now. She wept and cursed, and when she had no options or other ways to move on, she cursed again and stepped into the door.

The ooze rushed against her body. It sank into her nose, it coated her lungs. She was suffocating as she pushed her way through, and she could feel her heart pounding as she forced her way forward. She pushed on as her skin pulled and her hair was yanked back. She fought her way through as it closed around her back and consumed her completely. She kept pushing until her face broke free, and with it, she could breathe again. Her shoulders, then her chest, her arms, fingers, then her hands. Slowly as she pushed, she freed herself of the nightmare of the door, and when she collapsed on the other side, she realized she had been scrubbed clean. She looked at the room before her, a dining room table with food on the far end. At the table sat a fiend she had no name for, but she knew him all the same.

–Excerpt from Queen of Victims, work in progress

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When in this room, you have permission to be a writer and nothing else. You’re not a mother, you’re not a father, you’re not working at a gas station, you’re not a grad student. You’re a writer now. The fiend at the table gives you permission to only be a writer.

What did Joey Ramone say? Hey, ho, let’s go!

There’s a lot in these classes. I packed these classes full of everything I could. I’m gonna be showing videos to you and I’m going to be showing memes to you. You’re gonna read books, short stories, and a long novella. You’re gonna read PDFs. We’re gonna break down the things that all of these different types of writing have for us to learn. And we’re gonna create one story. It’s due in seven weeks. We’re gonna critique it, then you’re gonna rewrite it and revise it for the end of the class.

You’re gonna have a number of small writing assignments peppered through, and this is going to be a very challenging class. I have so much information I’m going to give you. Even I think it’s too much.

I want you to listen to this song. It’s extremely well written. It’s by a group called Citizen Cope. It’s called “Son’s Gonna Rise.” I want you to listen to the lyrics, because this is what is happening in this class. This is what this entire class is about. The character is driving his car as fast as he can as his wife gives birth in the back, gives birth to his son in the back. You’re gonna give birth to one story. There’s gonna be a lot of pushing. There’s gonna be a lot of screams. There’s gonna be a big mess on the back seat. I’ll be driving as fast as I can to get you there. And remember, you saved my life. Teaching has saved my life.

Teacher Bio

Do not mistake passion for anger. I get really intense. I’ll start storming around the room, talking fast. I’ll sound angry. I’m not. Do not mistake passion for anger.

I’m bipolar. Medicated, but I think the medicines are starting to slip. But that’s between me and my doctor.

I have Non-24-Hour Sleep Wake Disorder. It was discovered I think in 2012. There’s not a whole lot known about it, but we know that the rhythm of my body works to a 48-hour schedule instead of a 24-hour schedule. Right now I’ve been up for 4 hours. I woke up at 3 in the afternoon. By 3 in the afternoon tomorrow I’ll still be awake. I won’t actually sleep until 11. It doesn’t really matter for this class, but it does. That’s the mind that’s putting this class together.

I’m also dyslexic. It’s been affecting me a lot more lately. It has a bigger effect on me when I’m agitated, but I am dyslexic. Words have a tendency to jump around on the page.

I get overly emotional. While writing a lot of this curriculum I would break into tears. I would get angry. A woman will spray perfume on her wrists, rub her wrists together, because as she gets excited and aroused, her body heat will rise. The blood coursing through her wrist will cause the perfume to activate and fill the area. It’s the same reason they’ll spritz their neck on each side. That’s a lot of what it’s like. Certain topics about writing get me really excited, and then I get really emotional. Just like a woman’s arousal activating her perfume.

And I do have DID, dissociative identity disorder. It’s very much like the multiple personalities, that’s what it used to be called. We’ve all seen some example of that on television or in movies. I will refer to myself by some of these names during these classes.

Good luck.

I’m an oral storyteller by trade. A lot of what I know about telling a story, I learned as a child from my grandmother, and from the feet of my grandparents, my uncles, my mother, some of the greatest storytellers I’ve ever heard. We were poor. We didn’t have a lot of opportunity to go out for entertainment. That’s how I’m going to be teaching this class, as if you’re sitting in the room with me and we’re talking. I’ll be speaking as if you’re looking directly at me.

Introduction of Grad Student

When I wrote this curriculum, I was writing it for a college class I would one day teach. And I had in mind that I would have an assistant. Through the writing of it, I had in my mind a grad student who would be standing in the class helping me with all of it. That grad student has become inseparable from the class itself. So as that person does not exist to you, they are in this room with me. I will be referring to them as if they are a real person. So let me introduce my assistant. We’ll refer to them as the Grad Student. They’re right here in the room with us. You can picture them however you want. The image I have in my head is a mousy kind of young man, dark hair. He moves fast, his hands twitch, and by the end of the course he’ll be confident.

The Grad Student has a difficult job. They have to watch to make sure I haven’t lost it or am in some kind of emotional distress. They’ve gotta run all the machinery, pull up all the videos, that sort of thing. If I start acting weird, looking depressed, looking confused, the Grad Student has to call me back out. My name is Prince. I’ll be your teacher. You might get a look at Artist, some call him Smear Lord of Ire. You’re probably gonna meet Shade. And in this particular class, if I look confused the Grad Student will have to recognize it and call out Prince. My hope is that me and the Grad Student helping me with this course become close, get to know each other… but I know they live a busy life so we’ll see what we can do.

If you see some kind of change in me, see something weird, you can feel free to call out Prince, too. Just try to be understanding about it.

Syllabus

In order to go over everything I want to go over, I would have to assign you 6-7 books in this class, and all of them would be crazy expensive and all of your reading assignments would be short. So instead of using books to show you the things I’m talking about, I am going to be using music videos off of YouTube, links to excerpts from volume one of my autobiography Teardrop Road, and the lengthy novella Seeds of Tarako.

We’ll find symbolism and meaning in these videos. Some pop videos, some country, some heavy metal. We’ll find the meaning in them, and it’ll help you suffuse your own work with those symbols and meanings, and many others.

Writing is writing. Some people will tell you that writing has to be of a higher quality in order to be called literature. Some will tell you that only a book, only a poem… there’s television shows that are just absolute art because of the writing. Music videos, love letters that kids gave to their girlfriends and boyfriends when I was a kid. Some of those were pure art. We’ll be looking for good writing anywhere we can find it. In the backseat of a car driving down the highway like a rocket as the sun is rising in the backseat. Or on a grocery list. That’s a weird one, let me explain.

The grocery list, if you know your grocery store, can be written in such a way where everything’s in order of where you meet it in the aisle, so you don’t find yourself criss-crossing over the store over and over again. That’s good writing.

A six-word text message, if sent by my teenager Willow, can be a great piece of writing. So we’re not necessarily only going to examine books, plays, it’d just truly be too cumbersome. We’re going to find writing in easily consumed pieces, some reading, some videos, and other sources as well.

Coming to Class Late

She had the bag. Do you know the type? I bet you can picture it. It is big with a long strap but the strap is thick and there is no zipper or button on this bag. The bag is made of some exotic material, like hemp or corduroy. The bag is rounded where the pouch meets the strap and it does not hold its shape at all. It sways and crumples and when you set it down, it looks like a pile of cloth. It holds all the magic that women like this tend to carry with them. It is a Romani’s bag. An actress’s bag. A singer’s bag. It is the kind of bag found on artist types, and when I saw her sway in with it, I knew I had never seen anything like her before. – Excerpt from The Keep, “Love”

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There is a lesson to be learned with, “Don’t show up if you’re ten minutes late.” It prepares you for a job. But I’m not preparing you for a job. I’m preparing you for expression. So my rule is 7 classes, because even if you’re late, you might say a thing, do a thing, drop a bag in a way that inspires a classmate to do something amazing.

(1) Have an excuse, whether it is true or not. You can’t say it out loud to the class, but if you come to this blog late, I do want you to write your excuse in the comments.

(2) You can be up to 7 classes late except on critique days. Critique days I want everyone here on time.

(3) Classmates will give you a thumbs up or thumbs down based on the quality of your excuse in the comments, real or created.

Story Assignment

1) One inch margins, 12-pt, double spaced, 2,000-4,000 words

2) At the bottom of each writing assignment, I want you to rate the assignment on a 1-5 star rating scale based on your own ability and how happy you are with the piece.

3) At the end of each writing assignment, I want a paragraph no more than 150 words telling me your opinion of your performance of the assignment. (It will not take me long to assess your writing ability. If you lie to me in your ratings, and your final review of your work, I will know.)

What I expect from:

Fantasy: Some sort of element that we don’t find in everyday living. I’m looking for a system of magic, a kind of creature, even a kind of idea. In order for your story to be considered fantasy it has to have this feature.

Sci-fi: I’m looking for some kind of technology, a glimpse into technology of the future. That’s about it. Just some kind of look into and discovery of technology, be it in the future or not.

Romance: Romance is an exploration of love. I need to feel that love. I need to feel some kind of challenge to that love. If you’re gonna write a sex scene, make it as clean as possible. This is not an erotica. I’m not allowing erotica in this class, just romance.

Historical fiction: I expect historical fiction to be accurate in some way. You better have a grasp of the time period or the event. Know the characters. If you’re writing about Louis the Fourteenth, the Sun King, it better be clear that he is a genius, and the things he’s doing with his court had never been done before.

Literary fiction: If you choose to write a piece of literary fiction, your classmates had better be able to find literary elements that we can use to dismantle the story and bring clarity to some event in the world.

Abstract fiction: Abstract fiction had better have some sort of cohesive unit to it. When I speak about abstract fiction, I am talking about a story that doesn’t make sense the first time you look at it, and that can be confused for other things. If you’re writing a piece of abstract fiction and you have some strange creature described vaguely, your piece better make sense, if I picture it as a cat, a dog, or a Chupacabra.

I’d like to remind you that your story will be due in seven weeks. That’s when it should be ready for critique.

Reading Assignments

Reading Assignment for next class: “Savior” chapter from Teardrop Road.

Seeds of Tarako will have to be read by Class 17.

—Prince