The follow-up epiphany to "Thinking = Good" is that I've got a hell of a lot more thinking to do if I'm going to do this whole Writing Thing.
As I strolled through the Fells this weekend, I listened to a bunch o' Writing Excuses podcasts, including one on how to turn an idea into a story. The prompt they used was that insects had suddenly gained a resistance to all pesticides, and had started chomping through all of our crops, and how one might construct a story around that idea. They proceeded to talk about the process they'd use to turn that into an outline for a story:
- Figure out points of conflict
- Define the boundaries of the problem
- Start sketching out possibilities (a "book guide") for The Big Three:
- Plot
- Setting
- Characters
- (Perhaps) figure out the ending, so you can aim towards it
Still, I also knew that I had avoided spending time on any setting work, and had been feeling it in my writing exercises, which are supposed to be loosely or directly based on specific stories ideas I have in mind. I'd start writing a minor scene, and halfway through be asking myself, "Why do either of these people care about what's going on? What reason do they have to not just call it a day and go get a beer?"
Long story short -- I spent a little time today reviewing the premises/scenes/characters that I've had in mind for awhile, and came upon the scary realization that I have a hell of a lot fewer grand story premises than I thought, more (potentially) fun, interesting scenes than I thought, and fewer characters struggling to get through shit than I thought.
In other words, I haven't done a tiny, tiny fraction of the background work I need to in order to actually start writing a story, no matter how poor. BUT . . . I have a lot of fun ideas, and it shouldn't be too painful to throw at least some of them together into a coherent narrative.
My fear when I started was that it'd be a waste of time to start world-building and grand plot-building too early, that I first needed to generate the writing-about-anything habit, and worry about story later on. I now think that that was a minor mistake. It is, however, easily remedied.
The only problem is, world-building and grand plot-building rarely ends up generating a significant word count, and I do like the idea of my primary goal being to generate a shitload of words on electronic paper. I actually emailed "Mur Lafferty" about this problem at I Should Be Writing, but have not yet received a response. I mentioned before that I was suspicious as to whether she actually existed . . . if the lack of a prompt email response to his Hallowed Grumpiness isn't 100% indubitable confirmation of that, I'm just not sure what would be.
I think I might go with a 3x multiplier for setting-scribbling, or -- oh, better yet -- track the amount of time I work on these, and give myself credit for 35 words/minute (as, according to my Write Or Die program, this is my average WPM rate.)
Eeexcellent. Problem solved. By the way, today could have been a better day for writing, but I still managed to put in about 2500 words. Not too shabby, compared to prior days, and about lives up to the expectations I had last night.
It's a long shot . . . but I have this image of myself, 5-10 years from now, published and relatively successful, spending 2-3 hours a day writing, looking back at posts like this and from last night, boasting about writing 2500 words in a day, or whimpering about my inability to sit still for fifteen minutes of writing exercises. Would be a helluva thing.
My own experience: I wrote, half-heartedly and hobbyishly, for years while getting my doctorate. Towards the end of that, I looked at what I was doing, and I said, "my god, this is actually pretty much crap," and then I stopped writing, ostensibly to finish grad school. Now I'm done with grad school, and having a hard time convincing myself to pick up that particular cross again, though in my heart I feel I should.
ReplyDeleteI dunno -- I never got into your Alex Pizza stuff, but you wrote a few things that I thought were pretty damned good. The short with something along the lines of a Dead Letter committee was particularly good, it reminded me of something from Ian McDonald's book Empire Dreams. (Not any particular story in it, but the flavor -- and it's an awesome, awesome book.)
ReplyDeleteI'd actually like to read that again, if you have it in the bowels of your computer somewhere.
Anyway, the gist is, let's grant for the moment that most of what you did was pretty much crap. That's the point . . . of course it was crap, and it *doesn't matter*. I'm jealous that you have so much. The next step would be to reread it, figure out what works and what doesn't, and do the whole craft-learning thing.
I can completely see why you wouldn't want to pick up that cross again -- the main thing is to not judge yourself for the fact that a lot of it was lousy, to recognize it is just part of the process. I think that even when you're an expert, and not a budding amateur, most of what hits paper is crap. The readers just get spared it.
If you want, sure. I've forwarded my copy of it to you. I think it's pretty execrable, though. " In the tower Miserable, the Lance Worth is king, for it is in
ReplyDelete> the tower Miserable that the Worthy are consumed by secrets." is something out of http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/