¶ … creative writer I am, where I'm from and what my parents did and all of that derivative kind of carp. I'm a bad creative writer. I write like Dan Brown. Which would be fine if I got paid like Dan Brown. Instead, I rip off opening lines from popular novels and misspell words that my spellchecker doesn't catch. My editor wouldn't mind so much -- she's always said that there are no original ideas left anyway -- if I could put together a coherent sentence or two. I went to Santa Fe for inspiration and found nothing but Christmas-drenched enchiladas. And I love non-sequiturs, but not the good kind that make you think, just the bad kind that makes me sound scatteredbrained. No, my editor wouldn't mind me being a bad creative writer if all I had was yesterday's ideas and typos: I don't have any good stories either. My high school English teacher told me I couldn't write for a video game company....

I have to admit I was insulted. Until I realized that plot wasn't my type of thing anyway.
Now characters, that's my bag. Nobody writes a nuanced character like I do. All my characters are as riveting as the TV characters I base them off of, like when I wrote a story about serial killer that was a private detective investigating serial killers. I swear I didn't know that had been done before. The judge didn't buy it. If I had any royalties from that story, boy, that would have cost me. And I can't name my characters. I write about John, Steve and Mary like it's going out of style. In my portfolio I have cowboys named Duke and bad guys named Snake. You wouldn't believe how many Lolitas I have. It's nuts.

If you can't have a plot or interesting characters, well, you need something. Like a popular trope. I recycle old Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov stuff. Hey, most people just recycle…