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| Three reflections: You can expect to feel awkward when you're doing a new genre. Practice makes familiar, so after a while you'll relax. Carelessness causes accidents, and in writing, some of those accidents are practice. Throw those back in the river until your sifter is full of pure nuggets of gold. Always write what you know in the first draft. And analogies to what you know. Then what you need to imagine to fit with that. Then by the third or fifth draft make sure that all those known things are completely in the subtext. Hang the fiction and the supposition on the truth but don't tell anybody that bit. There are interesting bits in every idea, but not every sentence. Sometimes you write about the boring part. The relief implies the anxiety, but the interesting part is watching your hero pretend to be calm while preparing to run. So if it's not gripping, maybe you've got the wrong side of the coin. A freebie: what about a fantasy world with assassins coins that are sandwiched with cast iron on the front and back, but the inner bit is pure gold. Because if you know you'll know. |
| Power of Gratitude Inside your brain is a machine called the RAS. This system curates your life experiences with an algorithm that brings you whatever it thinks you care about. Or, what ever your mind clicks on it gets more information about. So if you focus on the things your like you get more of that. Notice though, that when using this gratitude you have a lot of options. One that might not really pop out is, yourself. If there's money in the bank, who went to work so that it would get there? Food on the table, who put it in the fridge. The stories on your portfolio--you wrote them, and put time and energy into that. Now you can't pay it back. All you can do is enjoy it, thank them--and pay it forward. Your past self put these things there out of love: love for these things, and love for you, and love for your future self. As you look into their eyes, all your past selves, you can begin to think of ways you can pay it forward. Clean the fridge. Pay the bills. And write that story you were thinking about at 2:35 in the morning. You know the one, I don't know if it's a good lead but there's something there. Your past selves are your team, their hopes are pinned on you and what you do. |
| The roman Poet Horace has a bit of advice: "Well begun is half done." As quoted by the newsletter for Atomic Habits. Not as punchy as Odin, god of (among many things) war, magic and poetry: "From a word to a word I was led to a word; from a deed to another deed." Bringing it all together, I quote the book "Mini Habits." Basically the whole of the book is about how if you start something every day, in the same way, you get so much more. Continuing is down to luck or circumstance or biology or spoons, but actually starting is something you control. And by starting, that could mean putting on your shoes and stepping out the door for an athletic routine. For a writer it could be deciding which project and opening the file. The point is, if you did that first micro step you are one hundred percent successful. Even if that's where you stop you get the full credit for that step because it is the most crucial. And if you find you don't always succeed at this, pare down your first daily standard till you do crank that starter every day. Because Horace was kind of wrong: even badly begun is at least half of done. |
I finally updated these two stories into the single, dual-point-of-view piece it should have been.
This is a hard hiting domestic thriller about a wife and husband dealing with issues of mental health. I think it's greatly improved in this version, since we now get the full sense of what's going on in one timeline. I found the original so troublesome that I had to rewrite it in the villain's POV in order to finish it--learning that she was not a villain at all. The thing that drove her was the inability to accept that she had been innocent all those years ago. Although it needs a bit more especially in the epilogue, I think it rewards those who are willing to face the monster in the mirror. |
Looking for lighthearted Christmas fare? This is my best attempt. Oliver lives in a world where people no longer believe that people built the second moon Nasa, and cars have been replaced by horses. The deep thinking is pushed to the background and we follow a disappointed magician boy as he discovers a little bit of midwinter magic. |
| So I finally figured out why the land on Felman Hill--where the necromancer, Nameless Felman, has his necropolis--cannot be farmed. Some villain salted the earth centuries before. Maybe it explains why the undead there are mainly non corporeal. Maybe it bounds their graves. Funny how things click. Moving on from Halloween, I'm looking next at my fantasy world's Christmas. The Festival of San Nikklau culminates in kids with means putting their older toys out for San Nikklau to steal and give to the poorer kids. But my soft hearted Oliver isn't allowed to participate. They are our servants, not our friends--unless you want to become like them. |
| If you're not getting better despite writing a lot, come down this thought progress. I just heard a Youtuber say that if none of your practice is uncomfortable none of it is getting better. So here is the idea of controlled frustration. Frustration means that you've found something you think can be better. If you're either doing practice or an infinitely refinable skill, then that's a good sign. The best writer in the history of the world can improve. If you expect that there will always be room for improvement you will naturally and automatically get comfortable with frustration. Just expecting a thing to exist makes it comfortable. Once you're comfortable with it, then you set a goal to find that edge. You become the hunter: that rough edge may be the enemy but seeing it means you're winning. This idea closes a loop for me, because I'd build frustration to increase my interest in a task--then get kind of freaked out when I got too much. This is why I had a slump at work, losing my inner peace to the point where my customer service suffered. So what I expect to happen is, now I tell myself that this level of frustration is a sign of success and progress rather than meaning that I've gotten to my highest peak. That will allow the frustration to shift from a burning fuse into a tantalizing sizzle--a sign to pull me forward, rather than a sign that I'd gone too far. That should allow me to resume progress. |
I just added another story
A knight in shining armor is having the dark night of his soul as a little elfin girl playing with her kitten blunders into danger. Adapted from a game session over twenty years ago--this one stuck with me. |
| My characters are up to shenanigans. The title of my totally unwritten story The Lawright All that I've written is the law... making petty food theft a limited punishment and requiring seven appeals. (Although a penny loaf is NOT a small amount of bread.) I'm thinking Oliver--my anxious, agreeable little wizard--is the perfect one to steal in and get caught in an act of chaotic good altering the law. If the Queen catches him, will she turn him into a caryatid of glass (actually salt)? And if she approves, it is really an act of chaos? And would Sigrun approve of him warping the law that way? |
| It isn't locked and it isn't blocked. It is wide open. the words are there and they're just as accessible as ever. And one truth will reveal that fact: It is going to disappoint you So what gets called Writer's Block should be labelled Writer's Daunt. And the truth is also that any word that is real beats a glory that is fake. Let it disappoint you and it will lead you deeper into your subject. And that's how you find the words you're looking for-- And maybe they'll be even worse. Maybe you'll want to hide them and run screaming from your page. That's Okay. In fact it might even mean you found the real vein--if you have the courage to share it. But unless you allow it to disappoint, shame, or even horrify you, it will remain blocked to you. It isn't blocked, you're blocking it. |
| When you want to do something fast do it repetitiously--like all the tasks given to The Karate Kid. Thousands of times until you're doing it in your sleep before you know. The MRU can be like that. Start in your drills like this: give the hero something interesting to want, and how they feel. Then start the MRU What do they observe? React (thought emotion) Reflex Deliberate action Complicated action, like sentences. Then you repeat: What are they feeling what do they want (in your head) What do they observe.... Now Swain comments not to bother with drills, because nobody who sticks with writing will waste time on drills. You're panning for gold; even if you DIDN'T have a story in mind you can find one. It's not a drill it's a story extractor, so go with it and see what happens. This is extreme pantsing (I also recommend madlib outlines too, at least in theory.) What do you think--will I not be more fluent as a fiction writer after ten thousand of these? And would it not be awesome to craft compelling stories out loud and off the cuff? |
| Impossible--but it happened. (In your story.) Here is the reason why mistakes are your best friend as a writer. Confabulate. This is where you take two or more facts that you know about a story, and interpolate still more facts as if they were always known. In reality it's a source of error but in your story it provokes great world building. The mistake creates stuff that's better than what you would have done otherwise. I know that you've never confabulated consciously, so how do you use this? Well, instead of asking whether what you wrote is right, just assume it is. Don't ask, "What do I have to subtract to let this make sense?" Instead, ask one of the five W's WHY? Sure you could rewrite it without the mistake, or you could follow the mistake like a sleuth to the truth behind it. You've got the surface. Right now it's a castle in the air--as Thoreau said, that's where they should be. Now build the foundation under it. |
| Just because it's canon doesn't mean you need to publish it. Fortunately it's an epilogue for a minor villain. I need to chase it down and learn what they need to learn, but I'm not at all confident that it's a story that I can tell. (It might read exactly the opposite of what is true.) Then again, I haven't seen the ending. It might land right--for those sharp enough to read it. As mother always said Just because it's true is not adequate justification for saying it. |
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This is really on point. Yes, that would work, although on paper/screen seems more readily adaptable to me. I'm already too nervous to do it!
Maybe it's because of a shift away from just rush writes to a more particular pattern. I know without the rush writes I'd've struggled in my online college classes. (The professors liked my writing even if upon rereading the writing was odious.)
I wonder if it would work to use the hypnotist's ratios of expected to unexpected statements. But that's something after I've got this drill underway.
Maybe I should do six weeks of just rushes, then six weeks of MRU drills. Three months to get where few ever get is a short period.