A Dash of the Disposable
As writers we spend a lot of time creating meaning. We create meaning in our characters, meaning in our fictional world. We try to create mythologies to explain aspects of our world, especially if writing sci-fi or fantasy. We try to create symbolism and depth wherever we can. Everything has to be meaningful, otherwise we don't like to waste time thinking about it. But there's something we're missing when we do this...
Creating meaningful things isn't the only way to go.Sometimes meaningless things are important to a story.Enter the concept of the one-off. A one-off is a disposable event or idea that you include in your story, and will only be used once. It is a novelty item. Some might refer to it as a 'gimmick.' It offers no long term value to your story, or even your intellectual property. So why bother thinking about it?
Let me use an example to illustrate why it's important;
The big boulder that rolls after Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It happens in the first ten minutes and is one of those things that people remember forever. It is used in pretty much every trailer or collage of different movie trailers. It is a hallmark scene for the Indiana Jones series. The most interesting part?
It's disposable. It has no lasting meaning or value to the story or intellectual property. It is a throw-away, a disposable one-off. Not to mention the fact implausible.
There is no reason why the Hovito natives would spend thousands of hours, materials, and effort carving a huge, perfectly round boulder and the track it rolls upon, just to kill intruders to their sacred temple. The same might be said of the other traps Indiana Jones encounters, but the boulder is clearly the pinnacle, the Mother of All Over-Wrought Traps.
It has no use or place in the story in any meaningful way. It's just there purely for entertainment. By that measure it doesn't even qualify as a McGuffin. There is no connection between the huge rolling boulder and any other part of the story.
Yet it has become one of the most memorable moments in pop film history?
Perhaps we should all add a little dash of the disposable to our stories.
Obscurity is Incompetence
Following up on my last post whether creative people hate marketing,
Buzz, Balls, & Hype has a
great session with the doctor this week, helping a woman who suffers from the very problem I described. She's despised self-promotion her whole life, and felt it was a compromise to artistic integrity.
The most beautiful part is where the doc addresses her issue with this brilliant sentence;
"Your revulsion at others' self-promotion may, as you suggest, be proportionate to the degree to which you have suppressed your own need for attention."
This is a golden observation. I could not have said it better myself. Any time artists rage against crass commercialism, and boast the superiority of being obscure, I can't help but see the lonely, isolated, nerdy, awkward teenager who isn't popular, and doesn't quite fit in the group. Worse, such individuals often feel bitter about their social standing, and lack of attention.
The obvious attitude for a person in that situation is to say things like,
"Well, I didn't want to be popular anyway!" or
"Popularity is overrated!" or the age-old
"That's being a sell-out!"Deep in our hearts, we all know this is a simple rationalization for lack of success. Deep in our hearts, we all know it's an attempt to compensate, an attempt to justify obscurity and sometimes even mediocrity.
One of my favorite things that Heinlein said was,
"Obscurity is the refuge of the incompetent." Some might find that quote offensive. But look at it this way;
You may be a master of your craft, but if your work is not out there and nobody knows who you are, then how will anyone know that you are the master of your craft?It has nothing to do with the work. The 'incompetence' Heinlein spoke of has more to do with how you handle yourself and your work than the quality of the work itself.
You can be a competent craftsperson but an incompetent PR person for your work, or an incompetent brand manager, or an incompetent business person.
If you are incompetent in these areas, nobody will know or care how great you are as an artist.When you boil it down, the goal of artists and business people is the same;
To share their work with as many people as possible.Using that yardstick for measurement, obscurity
*is* the refuge of the incompetent.
But not all is gloom and doom. Obscurity can be used as simple feedback towards positive results. If you're not getting the attention you crave, try harder! Set up a book signing, or go talk to a reading club. Start a blog! Start doing things to promote yourself.
You don't have to settle for obscurity. And you don't have to feel dirty about self-promotion!
Do Creative People Hate Marketing?
"Many people bad-mouth marketing and advertising. They hurl all kinds of insults at it--until they have to market or advertise something. Then everything changes, and they realize the difficulty of effective marketing. They often resort to the tried and true, most of which is now the uninformed and the ineffective. What used to work in the past is impotent now in a world of clutter and complexity."
This statement from
Guerrilla Creativity
highlights my perception of many creative people. They seem marketing-averse. There are a lot of game developers, writers, and filmmakers with an anti-corporate attitude, perhaps not realizing all the work the 'suits' and 'marketing gimps' actually do?
If you ever plan to sell a book, you will suddenly have to think about marketing. Do creative people shoot themselves in the foot with an anti-marketing attitude?
Joining the Inner Circle
So I'm plowing through
Guerrilla Creativity by Jay Conrad Levinson. I'm on another hot marketing kick, and I thought this could help some of my fellow authors.
"A good place to connect with your prospects in the hopes of making yourself part of their identity is their inner circle. You must join the inner circle that surrounds each prospect. That circle includes the person's family, friends, car, toothpaste, coffee, sports teams, soft drink, beer, breakfast cereal, clothing, community, and a lot more. Most people have developed an intimate relationship with all of these elements of their inner circle and often describe themselves as Pepsi lovers, Wheaties eaters, or Forty-Niners fans.
The products have actually become like a family, through a long-term relationship based on familiarity and trust."
How do
you plan to get into the inner circle of the reader's life?
Exploration for Writing Inspiration
My
smArtist friend made his post already, so I suppose mine is due. I've blogged in the past about the importance of
taking breaks. If you have a decent camera and the will to explore, go get yourself some writing inspiration.
We went to a really cool abandoned grainery, and snapped some artsy shots. What becomes inspiring towards the writing aspect is what goes through your head as you wander some abandoned places like these. You often think "What was this for?" or "Why is this here?" when encountering mysterious mechanical devices and equipment. The environment begs many questions, which kickstarts the questioning mind.
Imagination is so often a visual exercise, as a writer you cannot afford to be without visual cues during the creative process. Get them wherever you can.
Why Sci-Fi?
John over at SF Signal
asks, "Why do you read science fiction?"
I thought this was one of those great, simple, honest questions that can be really enlightening when you explore the answers. I'll up the ante a little though. Why write sci-fi as well?
The reasons I both read and write sci-fi are pretty simple but often overlooked. Sci-fi is great for those big "What if...?" ideas. I love interesting concepts, paradoxes, or the way the future and evolution of society has such a huge impact of everyday lives and philosophy. For example, only in sci-fi would you be able to ask:
"Given the nature of relativity, if you travel at the speed of light for 10 years away from Earth, by the time you returned three million years would have passed. What would Earth be like?"
I think the biggest exploration of this concept, that I know of, is Planet of the Apes. They think they have found an alien planet when in fact they've found a future alternate Earth.
"What would happen if a super intelligent robot got paranoid or went crazy?" - You'd have HAL, from 2001: a space odyssey
The FutureGetting more into the nitty gritty, one thing I love is just extrapolating current political situations in extreme ways towards the future. Immigration is a really hot issue right now in the U.S. Like everyone else, I have my own opinions. But being married into a Mexican family gives me a perspective that most of my fellow anglos don't have. This isn't just about illegal vs. legal, or basic right & wrong. There's a human side, a human struggle to this. The future poses some interesting questions;
"What if they build a 2,000 mile fence like has been proposed? What if after the fence, they build a solid concrete wall? What if eventually they put armed guards on the wall? What if eventually they will have the choice and discretion to shoot anyone illegally crossing? Wouldn't that be like the Berlin wall? It's depressing, but entirely possible. How could the U.S. get like that? What circumstances would have to change or evolve to get us to that point?"
These are interesting questions to ask, and are one reason dystopias are a popular theme in sci-fi. You can extrapolate certain political situations into the future and find their extremes, which make for both a compelling story backdrop and also provide some excellent human drama.
TechnologyTechnology always changes philosophical expectations and can sometimes be downright weird. What would it be like talking to yourself? What if you could instantly clone yourself down to matching your current brain state? What would it be like to have another version of you with all the same memories, going around walking, talking, and living as if they were The Real One? The movie 6th Day explores this concept.
Here's a freebie from my short story idea stockpile;
"What if you could not only clone people, but objects as well? What if you could clone any item? A gun? A TV? A Ferrari? What would happen to the value of things, and our understanding of an item's worth if we knew we could always and forever make more? If you and only you had one of these 'item cloners' what would you do? How would you hide it? You can't use it without people eventually finding out! So... what if?"The idea of constituting items or objects from the basic elements has been explored in Star Trek, and likely in other places. But has anyone examined the true implications of it?
What I love about sci-fi is also my beef with much of sci-fi as it stands--nobody takes the ideas far enough. The item-cloning idea is a perfect example. I think in Star Trek, the ability to materialize items instantly was taken for granted. It's just a matter of fact.
But as a sci-fi concept, it's NOT a matter of fact. In 2006 Earth terms it certainly wouldn't be taken for granted. It's a philosophical gold mine! You could instantly materialize food or other items, which could address world starvation issues. You could instantly materialize anything! Doesn't that pretty much change everything? And what does it mean when anything can be had for free with a simple click of a button?
Philip K. Dick explored this concept in his short story AutoFac, about self-repairing automated factories that make human existence 'too easy.' The protagonists are a group of AutoFac-hating rebels who want to destroy the AutoFacs and return the power of craft & creation back to mankind.
Sci-fi allows philosophy, politics, and what it means to be human--allows those massive categories of things to be turned upside down, contents shaken out and dissected.
Could there be any better reason to love sci-fi?
Life Deadlines
Life deadlines make a great motivator. What if you found out that in eight months you were going to be very busy. So busy that you may have significantly less time for writing or other activities?
How would that change the way you spend your time right now? Would you work a little harder, or a little faster?
Fighting Distractions & Improving Focus
I don't believe much in the clinical diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder, but if I did I'm sure I'd qualify as having it. Without getting too deep into my reasoning behind why I don't believe in the clinical diagnosis of this particular 'disease,' I will justify myself by saying that almost everyone I've ever known is prone to distraction at one time or another. Some more than others. Some less.
I think it's part of being human. And the people who are Supreme Beings of Focus? You would often be surprised to learn that they too are distracted fools, but the difference is that they've learned to cope, hack their way around, or somehow deal with the problem in an effective manner. It is learning to avoid being a victim of your own problems and weaknesses by compensating through what I call 'self-hacks.' Others call them 'life-hacks.'
Since I am hopelessly distracted, I need to cope and hack my way through life's problems to find focus.
Here are some nifty tools I've found to help:
- David Seah's Printable CEO - It's a weekly 'Goals Tracker' that you assign higher points to critical activities and lower points to less critical activities. You tally up the days for an end-of-the-week total, and see where you did well and where you went wrong.
"But what would that tell me? That I'm distracted? I already know that!"Sure, but measure and find out exactly where and when you were distracted. There's also the Gaming component. I love games. That's why I work in the game industry. So any kind of tool that can present a personal challenge or problem as a game, with an objective or 'final score' gets me all hot and bothered. Printable CEO Goals Tracker lays out your week like a game.
How high can your score be? Can you get the highest score possible? Higher than last week? Or the week before? Oh, the fun of a challenge! Can you game your weekly writing goals?
- Notepaper Generator - I really like this one for the summary box. This would be great for doing a story outline, where you summarize the goals of the scene in the little box and have more detailed notes running down the page.
What I like about these two is you could print them out with the marked punch holes and slap them in a story project binder. Mmm... paper gets me excited.
There's also self-improvement guy
Steve Pavlina, who has a bunch of great articles--including
this one.
You've got to love LifeHacking. Speaking of which, I have to give credit where credit is due. All of these things I've discovered through my daily reading of
LifeHacker.com, and
digg.
Content Management for Writers?
I've been quiet the last few days. It's because I've been exploring various open source Content Management Systems (C.M.S.) to see if one of them would work better for some of my websites. I've tried
PostNuke,
phpNuke,
Drupal,
Joomla, and
Mambo Open Source. There's a writing point at the end of this, I promise. But first, let me give a quick highlight of what I discovered.
PostNuke - Not bad. Templates seem pretty limited, and in the end it 'felt' more like a collaborative site tool. Like Wiki, but with an interface. It's a little hard to explain, but if you take a look at some PostNuke sites you'll see what I mean.
phpNuke - A lot like PostNuke. Less templates. I didn't see anything that thrilled me, or that was very different from PostNuke. I'm sure there's a difference among the hardcore, but I'm not one of those people. I want to build a site fast and hard with as little coding as possible, but with supreme flexibility to make all the kinds of choices I need to make. phpNuke wasn't it.
Drupal - Drupal scored a lot better in my C.M.S. exploration. Very flexible. Very collaborative. They even have a Book Collaboration feature. That means, you and all your writer friends can login into the main page of your website, and start arranging chapter structures and do your little part of the book.
In the end, I had to pass on this one because it was missing a decent forum plugin/feature, or didn't seem to interface as nicely as I thought it would. It was also lacking in the template department. All the templates felt very spacious and empty. Maybe that's just an art/design thing, but if all the Drupal templates end up being spacious and empty in the same kind of way, then Drupal could be to blame?
Joomla - This is supposed to be,
"Mambo, but better. And made by the same guys!" Except, I couldn't make heads or tails of it from Mambo, and after messing with it while I was extremely tired, it just didn't grab me. To Joomla's defense, by this point my patience was wearing down a little and I was ready to move on as soon as I realized the tool wasn't going to do it for me. And it pretty much is the same thing as Mambo. Oh well, you live and learn, right?
Mambo Open Source - This was the one I ended up going with. Why? The interface is very slick, very easy. See
what I created with it in two days time. And because I thought Mambo and Joomla were different at first. I tried Joomla when I was exhausted, and Mambo when I wasn't. Mambo wins! ;-)
Those polls? That's just a component plugin. The forums? That's a plugin too. The automatic RSS feed config? You've probably guessed it - a plugin. And the best part about all of these? They are completely customizeable. You can tell them to be on the left or right sidebar, or aligned to the top, or bottom. You can order the polls to come before or after the navigation bar, login screen, or syndication feeds. It's entirely flexible, and entirely up to you.
There are tons of Mambo templates, to make your site look relatively unique. Oh, one more thing--and here's the real kicker--I've only touched like 3-4 lines of code throughout the entire time building
AbsurdMarketing.com.
Mambo turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. I've been making webpages the hard way for too long. Blogger is ok, but it's just that--blogging. What if you want a full-featured site? Forums? Sure, you can do that. But none of it will interface with Blogger very well - you'd have to say, install
phpBB and then put a link to it in your blog sidebar. That doesn't gel... not very cohesive. Lots of people do that, and you could to--if your host allows php scripts.
That's the other problem--right now I'm hosted through Yahoo Domains and Yahoo Hosting. They don't support php, MySQL databases, CGI executables, etc. If you don't know what these are, that's ok. Just know you can't do shopping carts on your site, or true forums, or anything other than basic websites using html and java/javascript/Flash. So I had to sign up with
BlueHost in order to do AbsurdMarketing.com.
BlueHost supports everything. They also give you single or double-click installs of things like phpBB or Mambo Open Source, shopping carts, all that great stuff.. All the CMS systems I listed above?
BlueHost will install them for you in a few clicks, right to your site. Amazing huh?
I'm seriously considering moving redchurch.com and Quantum over to BlueHost, and building some REAL websites. :)
And now it's time to get to the writing points. Where are the Content Management Systems for writers and creators? Even for game developers? We have very few.
What I'm talking about is this; How much time do you waste formatting things, setting things up, getting things ready, scribbling notes on paper, assembling notes, thoughts, and ideas--practically slaving over these things just so you can finally get to the point where you actually write? I don't know about you, but I waste a lot of time on non-writing tasks that are prerequisites for the writing.
Sure there's
yWriter, which is great--I'm using it for my rewrite. There's
FreeMind, which I'm also using. I love these tools. But I have to admit, as in all likelihood you will too, they are not Content Management Systems. Some of their features border on C.M.S. But they are not C.M. Systems.
So until we get our Writing Content Management Systems, we will have to continue doing things the
Hard Way instead of the
Smart Way.
But in the meantime, check out something like
Drupal. It might give you some ideas.
Oh yeah, and before I forget--one more plug... here's
Absurd Marketing. I built it in two days without touching much code at all, using a web-based click-driven interface.
Where is the writing C.M.S., indeed.
How to be a Successful Evil Overlord
By way of
Seth Godin, marketing rockstar extraordinaire, comes this link on
How to be a Successful Evil Overlord.
If some of these foibles weren't true, the author of the page couldn't provide such 'advice.' Are any of your villains guilty in making such obvious mistakes?
Three Things... Or More If You Like...
I'm normally not much for these little viral blog exercises. Too often they seem like an excuse to avoid posting real content, but this one seemed fun and more in spirit with the noveling. Rob over at
Writing Tips From the Trenches came up with this one;
"Go to Wikipedia. Type in your birth date (but not year). List three events that happened on your birthday. List two important birthdays and one interesting death. Post this in your journal."
July 2nd Events:
- 1679 - Europeans first visit my home state of Minnesota and see headwaters of Mississippi - led by Daniel Greysolon de Du Luth.
- 1776 - The Continental Congress adopts a resolution severing ties with Great Britain, though a formal Declaration of Independence is not adopted until July 4.
July 2nd Births:
- 1877 - Hermann Hesse, German-born writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1962)
- 1903 - King Olav V of Norway (d. 1991) - I'm part Norwegian.
July 2nd deaths:
- 1961 - Ernest Hemingway, American writer, Nobel Prize laureate (suicide) (b. 1899)
- 1977 - Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-born writer (b. 1899)
- 1999 - Mario Puzo, American author (b. 1920)
It seems like my birthday is a good day for writers to die. Nabokov was right on the money, dying both the day and year I was born. I never knew that.
Book Buying Addictions
Over the last year I've had to curb my book-buying addiction. You know the one I'm talking about. You see a book that piques your interest so you buy it. What's wrong with that? It becomes an issue when you've got a two-year queue of material and you still haven't stopped buying.
Because you know... I have to buy all the books in the world RIGHT NOW otherwise I might not be able to read them later, when every single one of them goes out of print, or Amazon explodes, and libraries everywhere shut down. I must prepare for the literary apocalypse, upon which my collection of unread books will become priceless!
It will be like Mad Max. Collectors and librarians will start showing up at my house with mohawks, leather outfits, chains and sawed off shotguns, threatening me to turn over my pristine copy of Philip K. Dick's 'Dr. Futurity.'
No, no. We must calm ourselves and realize that this is never going to happen. If you've got five thousand books to read, another one isn't really going to satisfy the hoarding compulsion!
Cheap Lessons In Story Structure
You don't need to read books on writing in order to learn story structure. If you've got a DVD player and a hit DVD, that's all you really need.
Chapter selections on a DVD are not really 'chapters' in the sense that they would be for a novel. They are sequences, in script-writing parlance. Several scenes make up a sequence. It just so happens that DVD chapters are conveniently divided by their sequences. Each sequence contains two or three scenes, at least by Hollywood blockbuster standards.
Building off the idea that a film is sixty, two-minute scenes, it's easier to understand this organization model.
You will find that most films contain around twenty six or thirty DVD chapters if you leave out the 'program start,' or the credits. Some go into the thirties, sure. There is a little variety. But most of the time the number of sequences is around thirty or less.
Now, within those thirty sequences you will find roughly two scenes per sequence. This would make a total of around sixty scenes.
For a lesson in story structure, study the chapter and scene division on your favorite DVD. If you look at the opening scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, and any Bruckheimer film you will start to see a pattern. Even films like Team America which parody Bruckheimer storytelling techniques owe their success, in part, to the use of them. Montage, anyone?
Almost all of them start with some kind of establishing scene. Usually the villain is introduced in the establishing scene. Sometimes it's the hero. Other times it's both the hero and the villain. The key point is that there is always an establishing scene. The viewer is not just dropped into the low-key pre-adventure lifestyle of the main character. Something always happens to kick off the story--and it's not what's known as the inciting incident. That comes later, when the Big Problem starts to affect the hero, or the hero is unwillingly tossed into the problem.
Script-writer David Siegel describes the establishing scene as "Somebody toils late into the night." in his
Nine Act Structure. It is the setup for everything that will happen in the rest of the story. Often times the establishing scene is a murder, especially in thrillers or murder mysteries where the rest of the story will be spent solving the case. Of course it doesn't have to be a murder as that's a little cliche. Use whatever you want, or whatever best fits your story.
It shouldn't be any surprise that The DaVinci Code also follows this pattern. The story starts with the murder of the Louvre curator by one of the central villains. Coincidence? Probably not. If you take a look at the way Dan Brown's novels are arranged, they follow the Hollywood blockbuster format pretty close. By that measure, Dan Brown's success was hardly accidental. Maybe you could get in on a little of that action too?
There are other features that emerge, illustrating a pattern within the most successful films.
Just as the wide variety of different human beings come from the same DNA structure, a wide variety of stories can emerge from the same story-DNA structure. Don't worry about the structure crimping your style. You can do whatever you want, and express whatever kind of color or flavor you desire within the pattern. Break or change the pattern too--as long as you know what you're doing, and the choice to depart from the pattern is for the good of the story rather than the whimsy of your ego.
Take a closer look at some of your favorite DVDs. You might notice some patterns emerge that could help turn your novel into a blockbuster.
How To Become A Genre Legend: Show Up
I was reading a
negative review of A Scanner Darkly over on SF Signal, and it reminded me of my little rant,
Asimov & Rambling.
In Wikipedia's Asimov entry, they say;
"Asimov was by consensus a master of the science-fiction genre and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, was considered to be one of the "Big Three" science-fiction writers during his lifetime."
Now I haven't read Arthur C. Clarke so I can't comment on him. But there is a visible pattern here with the sci-fi writers of the mid 1900s that I think is worth discussing. Every writer has flaws, and if you read Asimov, Heinlein, or even Philip K. Dick these flaws will become evident in very short time.
As I said in my other post, Asimov was a terrible, filthy, dirty, rambler. His writing itself is pretty good. He uses good grammer, avoids the use of adverbs, and in general his text is pleasing to read. As a storyteller, I don't have good things to say. His stories are slow and lacking in action. He's fond of info-dumps and meandering through the headspace of his characters. To put it bluntly, the stories are just poorly executed.
Heinlein has his own set of issues. His characters are wooden--especially his secondary characters, who seem invented just to make the author surrogate character seem like a philosophical genius. He seems to have been unashamed in his overuse of adverbs. Like Asimov, he's fond of info-dumps and meandering through the headspace of his characters.
Now we arrive at Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick is one of my favorite sci-fi authors. What he usually did right in his novels is something I wish all authors could adopt and learn. First, his novels are short. Rarely does a P.K.D. novel break 200 pages. When it does, it most certainly never breaks 300 pages.
Keeping novels short is good. It lets the reader know there is an end in sight, and it is easily achievable. It also shows that the author had to cram that entire story into those 200 pages. This demonstrates the abililty to get to the point. Philip K. Dick did this well. You usually have an idea what's going on by page twenty-five. In contrast, Heinlein or Asimov are barely getting started by page fifty or seventy-five.
The problem with Dick's work, aside from his fondness for adverbs, is that he wrote over fifty novels and most of them cover the same themes of paranoia, fascist police states, and the philosophical question; "What is reality?"
I like these themes. I like them a lot. In fact, I like them so much that I've been collecting Philip K. Dick's
entire body of work and have been slowly making my way through it over the past few years. But that's just me. Many of the novels are hit or miss. I enjoyed A Scanner Darkly more than John over at
SF Signal. But I also fully agree with his criticisms, and they are probably the criticism of the mass market for that kind of book.
The casual reader doesn't care much for drug or addict stories unless the story has some other kind of compelling hook to go along with it, like the redemption of the human spirit or the desire to be a better person. Audiences can be suckers for that kind of stuff. A Scanner Darkly certainly lacks that compelling hook. It's hard to sympathize with the main character. To make matters worse, the main character doesn't seem concerned with self-redemption or being a better person in the first place. So you have a drug story that only goes down the negative path, and doesn't use it's greatest emotional asset.
The other problem is, even for an addict story is that P.K.D. seems to get caught up too much in the surrealness of drug use, which he uses to explore his dead horse topic of alternate realities.
What you end up with is a redundant theme of P.K.D's work, explored through a mechanism (illicit substance abuse) which is not something most people can relate.
How does this relate to Asimov and Heinlein? Well, all of these authors are considered juggernauts of sci-fi, legends in their own right. By the sheer volume and precedence of their work alone, they probably deserve that title. But all of these authors have something in common;
They each have some terrible novels.
What's interesting about this is they are hailed as sci-fi 'greats,' and yet, they seem at times to break some or all of the rules of both good storytelling, and good writing. How do they get away with it?
They showed up. In a burgeoning golden age of sci-fi, they churned out novel after novel. Where many other authors gave up or scrapped their works, these guys just kept writing, and writing, and writing. They didn't let a bad novel stop them. Some of them even admitted they were bad writers, or that their stories were self-indulgent. Even when fully aware of producing bad work, they continued to release novels. They didn't give up.
They showed up.
Sometimes to make a mark on the world, you don't have to be the greatest or the best. You can put out shoddy work. You have the full freedom to make grave storytelling mistakes. It's better if you don't make the mistakes, and it's better if you put out great work instead of mediocre. But that didn't stop the legends of sci-fi from
becoming legends.When everyone else gives up, or stays at home... When everyone else quits or quietly goes away... that is the perfect opportunity for you to make an entrance.
Sometimes, all you have to do is show up.
Two Pages...
I've been working on my 2nd draft two pages at a time. Why two pages you ask?
Because if I remember correctly, in a PBS Bill Moyers interview with George Lucas he called a film "60 two-minute scenes." I'm not sure if Lucas made that up himself, or if he got it from another filmmaker. But that single description has been one of the best metrics I've encountered.
Because my novel is approximately the length of a film script--120 pages, which allows for sixty scenes, each roughly two pages long, I've decided to focus on the rewrite as one scene at a time.
It's been a great boost to getting things done. One scene, two pages. It might be longer than two pages, but as a general rule it's two pages. That's not hard at all. It's actually a lot of fun. I don't have the stress, waning confidence, and loss of motivation that crops up in rewriting the entire thing as a whole.
Having problems with your write or rewrite? Try a scene at a time. Break it down into smaller chunks.
Writing Unplugged
I've been having a hard time lately writing at the computer. It's not writer's block. It's the tool. I type around 65WPM. That's not terribly fast, as I have friends who type around 120WPM. My problem is, even at 65WPM it's too fast for meaningful expression to be captured, at least in terms of fiction.
It works for my Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy--a.k.a. blogging. Fiction is a much different beast though. Every sentence has a place and a significance. There is no place for useless or junk sentences.
That's why I often get more satisfaction out of writing scenes or snippets of dialogue by hand, in my Moleskine. Writing by hand forces a little more premeditation. It's a lot of work writing by hand, therefore what I write has to be damn worthwhile, otherwise I'm just cramping my hand for no good reason.
Typing doesn't force that same kind of selective pain upon me. It's like my momma always said, "Think before you speak or act."
There's a time and a place for the "Just write!" mentality. I don't feel it's justified on the rewrite. I'm not looking to rewrite my novel five times. I'm already having trouble with the second pass. Right now, "Just write!" seems like the worst advice in the world. I already did that once, remember?
I'd like to get it on the second try. If not that, then three times the charm. I'm already deciding that five times will be too much. If I can't say it in the fifth pass, then I'm an idiot and this is probably the wrong hobby for me. At some point, you reach a state of diminishing returns for the number of rewrites, and you're just wasting your time.
Transcription to computer text shouldn't be too hard if I keep it to one scene at a time. That should be my focus anyway; Make each scene as strong and resonant as I possibly can.
So I'm going unplugged, in the hopes that'll make it count.
