Quantum Storytelling

…and a lot more action.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to get off my chest here, and not sure where to begin. I guess I’ll start with the worst bit.

Right on the heels of my post about my wife and I expecting… we went to the first sonogram where it was discovered there was no heartbeat. So um, yeah. I’m not going to be a Dad afterall. In addition to the emotional sucker punch, the ‘kicking while I’m down’ is that I feel like even more of a dork for getting so amped and telling everyone about it. I’m going to cringe when people ask me about the progress, so you could say this is a bit of therapy for me to just come out and lay the situation straight.

Tell 100 people about something great happening in your life. Now go back and tell that same 100 people that the great thing isn’t going to happen afterall. I think we’ve followed up with maybe 10 of the most important people, and, well… I’m already emotionally exhausted. Which leads to…

The blog has been quiet lately. I’ve made a post every day for the better part of a year, which is something. But I’m not sure how much longer that will last. I’m exhausted. Intellectually and emotionally. Especially after the lost pregnancy and all the excitement I had built over that.

I’m tired of talking about my novel. I just want to finish it. I’ve been reading a decent advertising book called Hey Whipple, Squeeze This. Books about the art of advertising are great because they have so much in common with any other kind of creativity. One thing the author mentioned is… when you first start creating ads, your impulse is to ‘roam the halls’ so to speak, and talk up your ideas with everyone you know.

I have that syndrome pretty bad. I talk a really good game but one of my hard lessons in life is that I talk more than I walk. I don’t like that. In general, it’s a bad quality to have. Maybe it’s a quality all writers have–we like to talk. But a little more action would be nice.

Without going too deep into my family history… I had a grandfather who was a big storyteller. He had a gift for gab, and was a bit of an eccentric. His big failing in life was that he never accomplished much of anything, and left a broken family in the wake of his ‘adventures’ - most of which consisted in doing a lot of talking to people all over the world, but not a lot of acting or doing.

There is such a thing as a negative role model to learn from. I admire his passion and eccentricity to a degree, but I wouldn’t ever want to become him. I don’t want to be the Boy Cried Wolf or the big talker. I value action more than words, as a principle, and I feel it violates my own principles to talk more than act. Actions speak louder than words. These things become the epitomy of wisdom in our culture for good reason.

So with my tail between my legs, I’m crawling into my dark little cave to get some writing done. But as much as I’d like to keep my mouth shut in many ways I just can’t–this post is proof. So don’t worry, I’ll be here. Just less than before, and with a little more honest novel-writing work to talk about. Or that’s the plan anyway.

Less talk. More action.

While I’m at it, I should thank you all for reading this, and being regular readers. I don’t know if I’ve said it, and it’s a bit touchy-feely, but thanks you guys. It’s great to have a community of writers and bloggers like we do. Community is a great thing, and I love reading posts of my fellow text-slingers. Here’s to many more years of text-slinging, both online and off!

Got $10 million to create a cutting edge video game? No? Well then…

Got millions of dollars to create a Hollywood blockbuster movie? No? Then…

I refer to something author Steven Johnson said on his blog.

“So yes, books are not the dominant cultural form they were in the 19th-century, and yes, some of these new forms have amazing complexity to them that we’d do well to understand and appreciate. But books still matter in this culture, and if you’re trying to change the way people think about a complicated issue, the advice is the same as it was two hundred years ago: write a book.”

The cheapest way to put some ideas out there is to write a book. The only creation cost is time.

This is actually one of the big reasons I decided to write something. What about you?

I’m almost to the point where I’m happy with what I’m doing on my novel. It’s been a long struggle, and hasn’t gotten much easier but I’m a lot more confident and satisfied with the results now since I started studying scene arrangements and growing my story. The new version of the novel won’t look very much like that first draft I did back in November, and trust me–that’s a good thing.

If I didn’t like the drafting process before, I especially don’t like it now. But now I’ve got the best reason I could possibly have; I’m succeeding by my own different method. I think I also mentioned how I’ve been going one scene at a time, and whipping each scene in shape.

When it comes time for the next novel, I should have the process well-ironed out. Starting fresh, I think I will take everything that I have–all the elements I’m sure of, my starting points, and do a nice template scene arrangement with the elements I know. Why is this helpful? Because then you just connect the dots and fill in the gaps. And if you understand that the scene arrangement follows a certain structure, then you already know the type of content you need to provide. The rest is just creativity and a little work. A single-sentence synopsis for each scene would be enough–enough to give you an idea of where you’re headed.

It feels much more rewarding to start with small pieces and build from there. Now the only question is if I can finish this up by November. I’ve got two deadlines in November. One is I’m going to start NaNoWriMo again. But I’m not sure I’ll finish it, because my second deadline for November is the 28th–my wife’s due date for our first child.

I’ve got a lot to do, and not much time to do it!

UPDATE: Therese over at Writer Unboxed has a neat post on Swaddling Your Manuscript. I don’t know if I’m swaddling it, but I’ll sure be swaddling something else soon enough!