Monday, November 26, 2007

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.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

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.

Monday, November 12, 2007

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.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

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 :)

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

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.

Monday, November 05, 2007

70 Days, 11/05/07

Words
Lunch: 135
Home:
Total:

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