Posts Tagged writing
Inspiration from the Master
Posted by DLThurston in Capsule, Inspiration, Nickajack, Novels on June 24, 2011
I’m going to write this post very slowly and deliberately so I don’t gush.
Deep breath, and begin.
Last night I was in attendance as Neil Gaiman’s tour promoting the 10th anniversary edition of American Gods hit the Press Club here in DC. (Holy crap, guys, I got to see Neil Gaiman). The event was a metered affair, featuring a few readings, talking about his inspiration for writing the book, and taking submitted questions from the audience. (He totally announced his next book for the first time yesterday). I’ve never had a chance to listen to an author that I respect so much just talk about his inspirations and, to a lesser extent, his process. (He’s totally the bestest writer and I got a signed book and…)
Shut UP inner fanboy.
Alright, decorum.
The goal of the event was largely to push purchases of American Gods, a goal I can understand and respect. To a certain extent almost everything that an author does in public is about driving sales. Hell, this blog is about driving sales, and I don’t even have anything yet to sell you (Steam Works, this summer, Hydra Publications). Especially since the event was a book tour event and not a convention event, it wasn’t really about connecting with authors and instilling inspiration. But it was.
See, here’s the thing. That gushing fanboy above? That’s me. That’s the me that has loved every exposure I’ve had to the talents of Neil Gaiman. That’s the me that is jealous that he can move so effortlessly from novels to short stories to comics to teleplays to music production to children’s books. Hell, he even mentioned he’s working on a musical. A musical! Have I ever told you about the musical I want to write? Now’s not the time, remind me later. In the end, I think Gaiman is who a lot of writers want to be like, that potentially unobtainable level of cross-media production and mastery. So something about just being there and being reminded that he’s a real person, yeah, it’s a geeky fanboy thing of me to say, but it does inspire me to push on with my writing.
And especially? Getting back to my novels.
I’ve moved towards short stories lately, which I think has really helped me grow as a writer. But it was at the cost of walking away from one of my favorite novels that I’ve started, Capsule. It’s really time to walk back again. And to even start looking beyond that. I know where the next few scenes of Capsule go, trust me, I’ve actually been thinking about it, even if I haven’t been talking about it. And I’ve been thinking about how to write a story around two characters my wife and I created, setting them in a steampunk world for a novel I’m currently calling Nickajack in my head (though there’s totally a book by that name, I know).
So. Yeah, there it is. What’s the lesson from last night? I’m not going to be Neil Gaiman.
Unless I work a hell of a lot harder.
Write, Don’t Edit
Posted by DLThurston in Editing on June 22, 2011
WYSIWYG text editors are possibly one of the finest innovations that has hit the world of writing. Look, I never had to generate a manuscript on a typewriter, I don’t know what it was like, but the ability to go in and shift a sentence around, insert a paragraph, change a character’s name, all without having to completely retype a manuscript? Brilliant. Can’t imagine living without it. The ability to edit is always right there at your fingers.
The problem? The ability to edit is always right there at your fingers.
There are two directions I could take this. I could look at the need to push forward, or I could look at the need to edit more deliberately at times. This is the former. The latter is on Unleaded.
For me, editing has always been a siren song. Back in college whenever I was working on a piece of long fiction, I’d start by editing what was already there, and then adding on new material at the end. The problem with this? Well, there’s a joke I love. Guy gets a job painting the stripes down the middle of highways, because that’s the kind of job people get in jokes. So he goes out the first day and he paints five miles of stripes. His boss is thrilled, that’s more than anyone has painted in a day before. Next day? He just paints two miles. Well fine, perhaps he exhausted himself over performing the day before, and that’s still well above the average for two days. Third day? Not even a quarter of a mile. Boss calls him into the office, asks what’s wrong, why is his production slipping off so much.
“Well,” he says, “I kept getting farther from the bucket.”
And there was the problem. I was leaving my bucket at the beginning of the story every time, and going back before I ever went forward. So the part I was editing got longer and longer, and the amount of energy I had left when I got to the end was less and less. This killed many an early novel attempt of mine.
What got me out of this funk? Nanowrimo. It’s a large part of why I recommend people try the one month novel challenge, because it forces you to move ever forward, not stop and doubt yourself, and certainly not give into the temptation of going back to make just one change. Now, I’m not going to say this is the best and healthiest way to write any novel. There’s always going to be some editing that happens as you go, but the trick is to get out of the mindset that everything preceding has to be perfect before forging ahead. In the days of typewriters, the only direction available was forward. Stick in the next sheet of paper, write the next scene, because editing wasn’t a simple process of find-and-replace, or highlight-and-delete, it was a more literal process of rewriting.
And this is where my mantra of Writers Write perhaps comes out the strongest. You’re writing a story, you’re not fiddling with it, pursuing it, editing it, nitpicking it, wandering around it, or any other verb, you are writing it. So get to it and actually write it. Then, when you’re done? That’s the time to go back and really start the editing.
Report from Balticon
Posted by DLThurston in Business of Writing on May 31, 2011
It would be entirely too easy for me to write a nice long woe-is-me post regarding my experiences with doing one day of Balticon. However, I’m trying to avoid woe-is-me posts, because I don’t like reading them when other people do them, so instead I’m just going to do some lessons learned.
Lesson one. One day is not enough to do a convention. Sure, it lets you attend some panels and wander around the dealers room, but it means you’re there as a casual fan rather than someone who is serious about getting some networking done. The two big problems? Networking largely happens after hours, and an hour spent in a panel is an hour where you’re not getting to talk with people.
Lesson two. If you can’t network, stick with people who can. It’s an art, it’s a skill, it’s not something everyone was born to do, or can even learn to do. That’s why having friends who are better at it than you can be a benefit. Though remember, they’re often trying to do some networking as well, so don’t cramp their style. But don’t be completely out of touch either. Networking is about knowing people who know people, and anyone you know at a convention who you’re not staying in at least some contact with while there is an opportunity lost.
Lesson three. Plot ideas can come out of the strangest panels. Deep brain stimulation. It’s like hooking a pacemaker up to the brain, and is being explored as a possible treatment for depression that isn’t responding to typical treatments. Oh yes, there’s a hell of a plotline there that’s churning over in my head. Hopefully that alone will end up worth the price of the one day admission.
So next year? I’ll probably do Balticon again, with the unquestionable goal of doing it better.
Tomorrow is June 1, so look for State of the Writer, and the day after is a Fortnightcap day.
Abandoning Ship
Posted by DLThurston in Business of Writing, Contests, Short Stories on February 3, 2011
This image is overdramatic for the content of this post.
I was originally going to call this post something along the lines of “how not to run an anthology,” but that feels like something I throw around a bit too much without having any actual standing. In the end it’s more about how not to approach an anthology, and how a story can die.
For a few weeks I’ve mentioned the Primogeniture anthology. It was an interesting concept for an anthology, looking at life for the average resident on board a generation ship that was just far enough out from earth that people are starting to realize that this shit is real. It couldn’t have aliens. Your character couldn’t be the captain. Or even someone that talks to the captain. It was entirely the day to day life in such a circumstance (yes, this ties nicely with my mundane in the alien post). When it was posted originally, there were very few additional details. The ship was named the Primogeniture. It had a captain and first officer. It launched in 2111 and the stories were supposed to take place in the first few years of a 400 year trip. The ship had 5000 people with an expectation of 10,000 upon arrival.
So I came up with a story about stowaways on the ship, and the implications when they’re discovered by a member of the maintenance crew. It was, I felt, right on the edge of what they might consider for the anthology, but with so few rules to play with I went for a wide berth. It is perhaps my own mistake that I didn’t contact the editors of the anthology before forging ahead with the idea.
What happened instead was I went ahead with the story. Then when I realized I needed to name drop the captain, I went back to the anthology call for submissions to discover the rules had changed. There was now a wider band of story lengths allowed, the stories could now be at any point in the 400 year trip, and there were more data points about how the ship operated, including dimensions and dispute resolution rules. None of these was in direct contradiction to my story, so I shrugged my shoulders and pressed on. Should I have written? Yes.
Well, this week I went to the site again, and found there were now more rules about ship life. Including, apparently, rather strict rules about birth control that include mandatory vasectomies, birth licenses, and strict birth limits. I now no longer feel like my story can work within the rules as presented. And…well, the rules have also now gotten self contradictory, as there is now a two-children-per-couple rule that doesn’t mesh with the anticipation of doubling population in 400 years.
So I do have my frustrations with the process, especially with the way the rules kept changing as the anthology went along. I was worried from the beginning that submitters were expected to read the minds of the editors, less they break a ship rule that they didn’t know about. Or, at least, write in and verify stuff. And that is a lesson learned for me in all of this. But it also just rubs me the wrong way how the goalposts for the anthology kept changing, and in some fairly major ways as the word count range and allowed settings both changed quite drastically after the original story call.
So could the editors have approached this anthology better? Yes. Could I have approached writing my story better? Yes. These are the kinds of lessons that must be learned by an aspiring writer, I suppose.
In the end, I’m forced to walk away from the story as a submission for the anthology, and may in the future rework it to remove the Primogeniture name from the ship and submit it somewhere that I can define the rules of the ship. Might even work it into a novel length plot or a screenplay. But for now I need to let it be. It is a completed rough draft, and thus it will probably stay for awhile as I shift my attention towards Bad-Ass Faeries and the Mammoth Book of Steampunk.
Unleaded quickie, Nanowrimo
Posted by DLThurston in Capsule, End of the Line, Nanowrimo, Unleaded Crosspost on October 27, 2010
New post up at Unleaded featuring SMBC and me…well, linking right back here again.
Next Monday marks the beginning of Nanowrimo. This year I’ll be missing a big chunk of the month as I’m heading to New Orleans for a cruise to celebrating the wedding of the proprietors of the Unleaded Blog (yay!). That means that the standard 50,000 word goal is out the window. But here’s the thing. I wouldn’t really want to anyway. I feel like I’m less than 50,000 words from the end of Capsule, and that trying to put that many more words into it would be contrived. And I sure as hell don’t want to start anything new, no matter how much I’ve been thinking about a plotline I’m currently calling “The Filibuster” (based on the old definition…shameless 200 Years cross-link). So here’s my Nanowrimo goal:
Maintain Nano pace on any day that I’m not on vacation until I get to the end of Capsule. Then work on editing, oh dare I even say it? End of the Line.
Also, came up with an odd idea for a flash fiction piece that I’m hoping to write and post here in the blog by the end of the month. Yay, flash fiction!