Status Update

While most people doing Sven seem to be writing more each day than I've done in the whole thing so far, I'm pretty pleased about wrapping up the first main arc of my story. I rewrote the end over lunch today, and it's much better. I'm not sure if I should press on and finish the rest of the story, or take a breather and touch up what I have a bit before moving forward.

Throwaway Drafts

I don't want to use numbers for fear that they'll increase the pressure, but I will say that I've hit my goals recently and I've been pounding away at my story this week. I'm about to wrap up the first arc of the story, and I'm really excited about it.

This whole "starting from scratch" experience has taught me something that I think is valuable: the throwaway draft (should I capitalize? The Throwaway Draft?). This sort of thing gets covered in writing classes and books (in "Bird by Bird," a book I don't recommend, Ann Lamott has an entire chapter dedicated to "Shitty First Drafts"), but the idea is always "Don't worry about if it is good! Just write and fix it later!" With my next longer writing project, I'm going to approach it a bit differently -- deliberately write something with the intention of throwing it away. Maybe this won't apply to other types of writing, but for fantasy, it has been amazing. I fumbled through my first version of this story with too much of my focus on the "cool stuff" -- magic powers, non-standard environment, epic conflict -- and wound up with a lot of junk. I didn't pay enough attention to my characters, so everything that sounded cool in my head wound up being lame on the page. Nobody cares if a bunch of really boring people have cool powers and are trying to kill each other under two moons.

When I read over the story, a few months after finishing it, I hated it. I needed to get to know my characters better, so I spent some time revising them, giving them more interesting histories and real pain in their pasts that would drive them to make stupid decisions periodically. I axed some characters, brought in some new ones. Then I sat down to rewrite, and things were much better.

I have some ideas for being for deliberate about this in the future. I have no idea if they will be effective, but hey, it's worth a shot.

Babysitting
Pick a couple of characters and write a few pages of what would happen if they had to watch someone's kid(s) for an evening. This kind of exercise would separate the characters from the environment, which I think would help immensely in a fantasy story, since the environment can often be a distraction. Even though the situation would be weird, it seems like a great way to find a character's voice.

Grocery Shopping
This is similar to the first one, only I would take one character and have him or her try to pick out stuff to make for dinner. This would provide an opportunity to focus entirely on what goes on in the character's head -- how he reacts to food he hates, how he thinks about other shoppers, etc.

High School
Dear heavens I hated high school -- would my characters hate it? Would the villain shake down the hero for lunch money? Would the hero pine over Suzie in chem despite the fact that she's totally out of his league? This type of arrangement could provide benefits from the first two examples.

Visitors to the New World
Put "normal" people into your fantasy world. No, don't make them "aware" (as in, "Wow! We're in a strange land!") -- just don't make them any different than someone from the real world. This will help you get a grip on the implications of whatever fantastic element you've added to your environment to make it special, and will help you understand how your characters might need to be different to fit in properly (an exaggerated example of what I mean would be putting an oxygen-breathing human in a world that is entirely aquatic).

Obviously, revision will always be necessary, and I don't mean to imply that I'm trying to eliminate that step from the writing process. The point here is to help figure out your characters before you have to start dealing with how the events of the story change them. Notice I said "help" -- almost every time I write a new scene, I learn something about one of my characters, so I don't want to give anyone the impression that a few prewriting exercises are going to solve all of your story's problems. They won't. They're meant to provide a few more tools at the front end that will breathe life into your characters.

The Track is Below Me (you could say i'm on it)

Between scheduled slacking and genuine distractions over the beginning of "the holiday season" in addition to the actual Thanksgiving weekend being totally freaking awesome, I haven't gotten much writing done. However, I'm ready to once again force life to talk to the hand while I get busy and make some progress. After a chat with my wife last night, I realized I need to completely BS my way through the part of the story I'm on and fix it later -- the important thing is to get the skeleton in place so I know what to flesh out later.

Edit: I realized I talked about a job I was going to pursue and never gave an update on that. I spent a couple of hours brainstorming and playing with the software, and basically concluded that I don't currently have the skills required for the job. I'd rather take my sweet time to get a feel for it, focusing most of my efforts on my fiction, and be capable of delivering something awesome next time a job opens up, than to bust my hump to crank out something mediocre and forgettable, while neglecting the stories that sometimes keep me awake at night. That might make me sound like a quitter, but I really don't care. If I'm going to apply for a job where I get to be creative, I'm going to make sure they get the best I have to offer.

Also, 338 words at lunch today.

70 Days, 11/13/07

Well, I'm taking something of a hiatus from my WIP to put together a resume. This isn't a normal resume, oh no -- a video game company is hiring writers, and they want applicants to create modules for a game that showcase dialogue writing abilities. I'd like to get this thing sent off by the end of the week, at which point I'll be completely focused on my story again. I'm posting this so no one thinks I'm slacking off.

70 Days, 11/12/07

No words today, but my wife helped me hammer out what's going to happen next, so I won't be flailing around aimlessly tomorrow. I'm pretty pumped about that.

A long, rambling entry about my writing process

This was originally going to be a comment in Lynn's blog, but it got way out of hand so it's going here (context: she asked about writing process).

My first thought is to type, "I haven't quite nailed a process yet," but I have a feeling that as I type about what I do, a fairly standard process may emerge.

I have a lot of stuff sitting on my hard drive. I don't consider most of it "Finished," but I do write a lot of short fiction, so I've had many opportunities to finish a draft and revise.

My ideas usually come in the form of "a story about a person who _____." The first thing I have to do with the idea is define the world that "a person" lives in. If my idea is "real world" (i.e. a college kid who is struggling with faith), this step is pretty easy (he's at college!). When things run fantasy or sci-fi, this takes longer because I have to basically write a world history, create magical laws, and try and get into the heads of civilizations that thrived and died long before the story takes place. If this weren't insanely fun, I would probably never write fantasy :)

This is a time-consuming process because I'm basically writing a story to help me write a story (in fact, the first time I tried this, the back story became the story, so I had to write even more back story!), so I find it's best to paint with broad strokes and fill in the details as necessary. I'll catch the inconsistencies in revision (I hope).

The reason I'm so thorough is because I want to be in control of any cultural factors that would influence my characters' personalities. I would rather have something de-rail my story at this stage than when I'm attached to where I think things are going.

Once I have a world put together, I drop my characters in there and see what happens. Sometimes I start by writing up character sheets (one time, just for kicks, I actually rolled the characters D&D style), but I've found that it's easier to write those after I've had a chance to work with the characters. Every interaction reveals something about a person's personality and reflects their past, so I like to let the character sheets grow with the story before I set them in stone.

I don't really plot. I mean, right now I've got three vaguely-defined events that I think need to happen, but they're open enough that I'm not locked into a specific course of action. I keep a file called "The Next Step," which really only gets used when I'm stuck in a "boring" scene and don't want to lose my direction, but it doesn't go very far. I've found that saying, "they'll kill this guy when they run into him next" doesn't mean my characters will actually kill that guy when they run into him next -- they're much more complex than I can sum up in a plot outline, so I try not to do that when I can help it.

I've only "finished" a longer story once -- it's my current WIP for Sven, and it marginally resembles the first draft and promises to be much longer. Part of my process was seeing how bad that initial draft was and revamping everything -- story, characters, world, all of it.

Sorry if this is kind of rambly. I'm at work, so I'm writing a few sentences at a time as I get stuff done :)

70 Days, 11/06/07

Words
Lunch: 212
Home: 729
Total: 941

My wife is making me write when I get home tonight, so I'll get more done. Most importantly, I managed to wrap up a scene that was driving me nuts and sorely tempting me to quit. I'm really excited about where the story is going, but this was one of those necessary downtimes that wasn't terribly interesting to write. Hopefully it is more interesting to the reader than it is to me. I always have trouble with the parts that explain the mechanics of the world, because I already know how stuff works and it seems redundant as I'm writing it, but I know the reader will probably appreciate a little more technical information so it doesn't seem like I'm just inventing magic and backstory as I go. I don't mean to imply that there is no improvisation involved, but I spent a lot of time developing the world and I think the reader should be confident that they'll be safe if they step into it.

70 Days, 11/05/07

Words
Lunch: 135
Home:
Total:

My eyes hurt pretty bad today, so it's tough to focus.

70 Days, 10/27-10/28

No writing -- apartment flooded. Working on that. Staying at mom and dad's tonight. Blah. Hope we can break our lease.

70 Days, 10/26

Lunch: 496!

I probably won't get more done tonight, but I'm pretty pleased with what I got today. I know what needs to happen, it's just kind of a "slow" part right now, so it's tough to write. I want it to be interesting, and not just filler, but I don't quite want to just say "and then they..." and skip all of it. Maybe I'll need to do that when I revise, but I really want to chug through this and get it out because it will be a lot easier to cut than it will be to add.

Anyway, yeah, haven't been hitting my targets this week, but who cares. It's been a very busy week.

70 Days, 10/25

Ok, today I decided that instead of trying to force myself to write the next scene, I would try and plot out the rest of this section of the story (I've got three sections planned, and I'm on the first). I managed to crank out 891 words over lunch. Granted, they aren't 891 "story" words, but I'm still pleased. When I sit down to hammer it out (maybe even tomorrow at lunch, since I did way more than I thought I would), it will be a lot easier to write. So...woo!

70 days, 10/24/07

Lunch: 344
Home: --
Total: 344

Depressing.

I'm going to spend today and tomorrow figuring out what, specifically, needs to happen to get me to the next major plot point in the hopes that I'll be able to crank out more stuff over the weekend and next week.

70 Days 10/23/07

I realized that since there are 23 built-in holidays, keeping the days numbered in my titles might get weird, so I'm going with dates now.

Lunch: 260
Home: --
Total: 260

I'll edit tonight or tomorrow, but since I'm not busy after work, I should be able to crank out a bit more once I get a nap in (I'm freaking exhausted today).

Edit: I went to bed at 8:30 last night.

70 days, day 7 and 8

I didn't write anything yesterday, but that was intentional, so I don't feel bad for it.

10/22/07
Lunch: 501
Home: --
Total: 501

Tired + busy = no writing after work.

70 Days, day 5 and 6

10/19/07
Words
Lunch: 551 (w00t!)
Home: --
Total: 551

I'll edit sometime tonight or tomorrow with the rest of the count, but I'm pretty pumped about today's lunch progress.

Edit: Ok, so I didn't get anything done at home. BUT, check out today:

10/20/07
Words: 988

I wasn't even planning on writing today, but while I was driving around with my wife, we hammered out the next step in the story, so I came home and wrote it. 

Today also marked the passing of a significant milestone for me. It requires a story...

Back in February of 2004, I had an idea. Now, I'd had ideas before, and had even made lazy attempts at writing, but this one really enchanted me, so I started taking notes. Before long, I had written twenty pages of history, character bios, and ideas for where I thought a potential story could go. One thing I kept coming back to was this idea that the characters would have a legend about a hero named Gabriel who had done some great deed. Then, at some point, Gabriel became the story.

The first twenty pages came relatively quickly, though I took frequent breaks to play with other ideas I was having. Then, despite my best efforts at keeping hard copies of everything I wrote, I lost most of the story to a hard drive crash. I kept working on other stuff, but I couldn't bring myself to touch Gabriel.

Luckily, I had given a copy of the work in progress to a friend of mine. She found it, quite by accident, and called me to see if I wanted it back. Emphatic "hell yes!" It was everything but a chapter that I had planned to delete anyway, so I typed it all up...and didn't touch it for a long time. I was stuck.

Finally, I said "screw it," and just wrote with the sole purpose of finishing the damn story. In July of 2006, I reached an ending. The story was 14,078 words, and though I knew it was rushed, I figured I'd fill everything in on revision. I let it sit for four months and gave it a look.

It was crap. I was embarassed. I immediately began a new draft, but... I guess life just got busy. After only a couple weeks of writing, I put it down and worked on some other stuff, then stopped writing as I finished college and prepared for my wedding. I started working full-time at my job, and began using my lunch breaks to write.

In September of this year, I started thinking about Gabriel again, and all the ways I could make his story way better.

Today, when I stopped writing, Gabriel's story was at 14, 928 words -- longer than the original draft. This time I know what I'm doing -- I've taken the focus off the mechanics of the fantasy world and put it on the people who live there, and that has allowed me to flesh out a whole lot more back story than I had before. The result is that even though I currently have more text than I did in my entire first draft, I have a lot more story ahead of me because I'm no longer trying to force my characters toward the next plot point. I'm letting them inhabit their world.

70 Days, day 4

Words
Lunch: 338
Home: --
Total: 338

Bleh. Yesterday was very long and I wound up sleeping for an hour and a half after I got home from work. I did babble what needs to happen next into the mini recorder (which needs an over-the-top name, since I call my laptop the Portable Writing Machine of Destiny), so today will feature less fumbling and more getting to the point.

70 Days, #3

Words
Lunch: 259
Home: 217
Total: 476

Eh, not so good today... things were a bit hectic. Oh well. Better than nothing.

70 Days of Sweat Progress Update #1 10/15-10/16

Monday 10/15/07
Lunch: 453 words
After work: 397
Day total: 850

Tuesday 10/16/07
Lunch: 246
After work: 513
Day total: 759

Well, that's two days in a row that I hit my target of 750, so even though that isn't really a lot of words, I'm reaching my goals. I think that's what counts, so...rock and roll!

70 Days of Sweat #2

Since I need to check in on Wednesdays and Sundays with my progress, I'm also going to post  here on those days. I also have a couple legit blog entries I plan to develop, so this isn't going to become the most boring blog ever.

Beginning stats
WIP: Shadow of the Mortals (this was the draft 1 title -- I probably won't keep it)
Beginning Word Count: 10,948
Day 70 Goal: 63,448
Daily Goal: 750 words
Weekly Goal: 4500-5250 (I'd like to write 7 days a week, but I'm allowing for distractions)

70 Days of Sweat

Yesterday, Krista mentioned something called 70 Days of Sweat. It sounds pretty great -- you sign up and people start coming to your blog to yell at you to keep writing,  and you report your progress twice a week. The goal is to write 750-1500 words every day, which (sadly) is a lot more than I currently write each day, so I went ahead and put my name on the list.

Obviously this blog doesn't get updated too horribly often, but I'll make sure to check in with progress updates and maybe even more craft-related stuff if I find time.

The Mini-Recorder, aka Pure Gold

It takes an hour to get to work in the morning, and an extra fifteen minutes or so to get home in the afternoon. That ends up being a lot of time alone with my thoughts, which often turn to my writing and what I want to accomplish in it. Now, some days I would be lucky, and I'd be near my destination when ideas struck, but more often than not I would develop something, growing more and more excited, only to forget it by the time I had access to paper or a computer.

Eventually I grew frustrated enough that I started looking up mini-recorders online. Microcassette recorders are really cheap these days, so I started looking to see what kind of digital technology would be in my budget. There is some pretty sweet stuff out there for people with tons of money to blow, and once I was done pawing at the screen I decided on a forty dollar one at Best Buy. It's digital and can allegedly store way more audio than I need, but it doesn't have USB connectivity. I did crave the USB, but I think I might be better off for not having it.

I keep this bad boy in the car, and if an idea strikes, I hit the record button and mumble awkwardly into it. By the end of the week, I've usually got around ten sound bytes. Since the thing doesn't have USB connectivity, I can't just drag them onto my computer -- I'm forced to listen to them and type them up, which gets my brain working on the ideas again, so I end up with even more material than I would if I sat down and tried to remember everything.

Obviously this sort of thing isn't for everyone, but I highly recommend it to any writer who spends a lot of time in the car.

Constructing a World, part one

Today I'm going to talk about a specific act of writing, rather than a general concept. As you may have guessed from the title, it's going to be about building a world for your characters to inhabit. While this may sound like something that only applies to sci-fi and fantasy, it comes in handy for realistic settings as well, because you really end up doing the same thing, just on a smaller scale.

I'm currently in the process of building a world, so all of this is in the first half of "trial and error." That means I reserve the right to contradict myself in a few months.

Every work of fiction takes place somewhere. I can hear people objecting, saying, "I wrote something that takes place in a guy's mind!", but I would just say that for our purposes, "world" simply refers to the setting of the story (where and when the story takes place) and the foundation upon which that setting is built (which may or may not involve itself in the story). Basically, "a guy's mind" would be considered a part or the whole of the world in that particular story.

While the setting involves a time period, location, objects in the environment - things that directly affect the character - the world exists beyond the scope of the story and its qualities shape the story and its characters. One of the first things to get a grasp of is the world's immediate history. Figure out what the top headlines would be -- was someone robbed or murdered? If so, how close were they to the characters involved in the story? These are the kinds of things that will weigh on people's minds for a time and potentially affect the way they see and interact with the world. Also know about smaller things, like if a new subdivision recently replaced one of your characters' childhood hangouts. These  are important details to know because they provide a context for your characters to meet and interact in. It's the difference between having an actual set and having cardboard cutouts behind the actors in a movie -- the cutouts might get the job done, but it's a whole lot easier to believe in the set.

Once the immediate history is settled, take your characters for a test drive. Get started on your story and ask yourself, "Do I know enough about the past for this story to work?" If the answer is yes, then great! It means you're that much closer to the final product. If no, that means it's time to go back even further.

If you need ancient history, your best bet is to start reading. Learn about real-world history, even if you're planning on creating an entirely fictional world. It also helps to look into the various mythologies that have existed at different periods in time (I recommend pantheon.org) to help shape the beliefs of your characters. Draw on these things as you create your own universe, as it really helps make your characters more complex.

Challenge: Write about an event that took place a thousand years before the story you are working on. Re-write that event as you think it would be known to the characters of your story. Keep in mind the tendency of time to distort the truth, particularly if good records are not kept.

The Blogger's Hypocrisy: A Lesson

I haven't written in this blog for quite a long time. In the true spirit of professionalism, I'm going to lay the blame on school, my wedding, and the beginning of my full-time employment.

Actually, I don't want to leave the impression that I haven't been writing. There were a few months where I used "too busy!" as an excuse not to write, and I paid for it. Here's how:

The stories I'm working on are of varying lengths -- many are short stories, but I have a few ideas that would fill something longer. Everything I've been working on has suffered because of my refusal to make time to write. The most obvious problem is that I lost the direction of many of my stories; I forgot why certain characters were being forced to interact with each other, and by extension lost the basis for the story. Luckily, I keep notes handy, so recovering that momentum was a matter of spending an hour re-reading the story and reviewing and revising all related documents. That's the simplest problem to handle.

The difficult issue to overcome is that I lost a lot of my drive to write. I got out of the habit of writing every day, and then into the habit of filling my writing time with distractions like TV and video games. What happened when I tried to pick it back up? I had reverted to the state of being an "inspiration" writer, the kind of person who only writes when he happens to be at a computer when a good idea strikes. I stopped pushing myself to try new things and took an undisciplined approach to writing, and as a result, was unable to write anything I found satisfying.

I think I've made huge strides against this one. In the past few weeks, I've made a point to sit down and write at least 300 words, and that has helped immensely. Even when I'm not satisfied with what I write, I'm a lot more motivated to write another draft in the hopes of getting it, if not right, then better. 

Challenge: Berate yourself for your laziness and your petty excuses! Then write 300 words.

Writing as Exercise

When I took music lessons, the one thing that every teacher had in common was this notion that I needed to practice between meetings. Of course, in the folly of my youth, I would spend the week playing Nirvana tunes, then have a five-minute cram session immediately before going in so they would think that I practiced my scales and sight reading. In the short run, it appeased my instructors, but the fact that I only practiced one aspect of the guitar made me weaker in all other aspects and set me back quite a bit.

Writing is the same way. I spent several weeks saying, "Keep writing! Write! Don't stop writing!" but that advice can only go so far before it needs to be expanded.

Every writer has a tendency to do well in certain areas and terrible in others. In my own writing, for example, I tend to do pretty good when it comes to dialogue, but when it comes to describing my setting I fall flat. It makes for a ton of work in revision, and the addition of scenic details may interfere with the dialogue I'm so proud of, which means altering that as well. It can be annoying. If I were to simply "keep writing!", I wouldn't really solve that problem because I would still tend towards good dialogue and bad description.

This is where the idea of writing as an exercise comes in. If my writing fails because I have trouble with the scenery, then I need to spend a little time writing exclusively about scenery. Perhaps that exercise is writing a story that relies heavily on various setting elements for its meaning: the main character is a bedroom that is constantly being redecorated by its teenaged inhabitant. While there may be snippets of dialogue in the story, the bulk of it would need to rely on tasteful descriptions of the room's furniture to get its message across.

But maybe the urge to write the easy stuff is too strong and derails the plan to focus on a weak spot. What then? Make it painful. If you're like me and have difficulty with setting, go find a place to sit and describe it. Look, listen, smell, touch; write it down. Find different ways to describe the same thing. Hang on to those descriptions and use them in your writing. Is dialogue your weak spot? Eavesdrop on a pair conversations and pay attention to the specific words that set them apart from each other. Bad at narration? Write about something you do every day, like eating breakfast or going to school. The point is simply to target your weaknesses with specific (if tedious) exercises.

Challenge: Identify an area of your writing where you are lacking. For one week, set aside time each day to focus on that specific area.