Writing

Camp NaNoWriMo 2016, Day 0

Nope, no ideas yet. My brain is in that mode where if I try to come up with something it just freezes over like a pond in winter. There’s probably some nifty trick to get past this–maybe I’ve even used it in the past and just forgotten–but it eludes me at the moment.

Still, no need to panic. I still have almost 24 hours to do that.

I asked a pair of co-workers for ideas. They suggested:

  • a Die Hard remake set on a zeppelin (or the Titanic)
  • some kind of love story featuring Herbie the Love Bug, Knightrider and their possibly illegitimate offspring, some kind of smart car
  • a person driven to (ho ho) madness by traffic and daily commutes. I suggested the title Honk.

If I do most of my writing during lunch I will be using my Surface Pro 3, which works well enough, though I still think I’d like a real laptop, mainly for the better keyboard and slightly larger screen. A person on Broken Forum said he switched to using an iPad Pro as a laptop replacement. When asked why he said it was mainly because of weight and lack of distractions. iOS has never been great at multitasking so you just tend to focus on what you’re doing instead of constantly flipping between different things. Hopefully he hasn’t heard of split view…

While using the iPad Pro intrigues me, the price is hard to take. It costs more than some (pretty good) laptops and that’s before you add things like a cover, keyboard or whatnot.Then again, it looks almost cheap compared to the Surface Book, one of the laptops I’ve considered (which can go for over $2000 after tax. That’s a lot of money, even in Canadian dollars).

Maybe I’ll write a story about a man who can’t decide what to buy and somehow the decision gets made for him and he has to live with the consequences. If it was a horror story, I’d end up with an 11″ Chromebook.

Camp NaNoWriMo 2016 or Why Do I Do This To Myself? Part 80

A few days ago a fellow forumite (and published author) on Broken Forum solicited invitations to join him in taking part in Camp NaNoWriMo. This is basically National Novel Writing Month done in July, with looser rules and a summer camp theme, including but not limited to putting people into cabins and where you can share spooky stories around the virtual campfire about how your muse left you frightened and out of ideas.

Since being invited to a cabin requires a project, I slapped in my failed 2013 NaNo effort, Start of the World (one of the worst working titles I’ve ever devised). I don’t know if I’ll actually try reviving it but I only have one more day to mull it over before the writing begins, so the suspense won’t last long.

It may turn out that Camp NaNoWriMo is just the thing I need. Or it could be another dismal petering-out. Or it could even be both.

Mostly I think I’m going to get up on July 1st, revel briefly in being Canadian, then spend the rest of the day shifting between writing paralysis and spewing out nonsense that sees me getting intimate with the backspace and delete keys (or on the Mac, the delete and other delete key–what’s up with that, anyway?)

Stay tuned for exciting and/or painful updates soon™.

My word factory continues to appear abandoned

The first and only rule of writing is to write (so I say).

Today the weather changed from weirdly hot to slightly cooler than normal, clouds gathered up in the sky (their favorite gathering place) and presented the threat of showers (it sprinkled a little). I opted to skip my lunch walk because I don’t like walks in the rain or on the beach or around candlelit dinners or mostly because I was paranoid the sprinkle would become a downpour and I’d return to work sopping wet. I also wanted a day off from the walks to show my right leg how beneficent and kind I am, to encourage it to heal and be wonderful and normal once more.

My usual plan when I skip the lunch walk is to curl up (well, not actually curl up, that would be uncomfortable) with my Surface Pro 3 in the staff lounge and do some writing. How much writing did I do at lunch today?

None.

But I surfed the internet. Oh yes, I learned about new gadgets, read opinions on various things and caught up on the news. But writing? Not a word.

I felt bad and proceeded to have an afternoon filled with cascading or at least remarkably coincidental failures. Karma? Perhaps.

Next lunch break I’m writing.

Discipline and writing…why does this sound familiar?

From one of my aborted attempts at reviving a journal comes this snippet on writing, which was penned (literally, as you can see) on my 25th birthday:

Waxing on writing with ink

In case the image stops working, here’s the text in convenient text form:

In truth, I like to write. A daily journal is an exercise in writing and an exercise in discipline. Everyday I must pour out thoughts on these pages, and attempt to be at least reasonably lucid and/or coherent. Through this daily regimen I will sharpen and hone my writing skills, I will cause the juices of creativity to practically sploosh out of my ears. Occasionally, I may even record something profound (do I have a straight face as I write this? I’m not tellin’).

This is culled from the first entry in the journal. It was followed by one more entry, after which none followed. Even all these years later I can appreciate the rich, flavorful irony reading through this paragraph of filthy lies.

On the one hand it’s nice that I recognized the need for discipline in writing back when I was still young enough to be at my sexual peak. On the other hand, I apparently didn’t keep a straight face while writing any of this (see: giving up on this very same journal after two entries). On the third hand grafted on Frankenstein-style, I have kept writing since that 25th birthday, even if the dry spells have occasionally been prolonged droughts.

More writing exercises and other writing…soon™.

CLAWS ~or~ How an 11 year old tries to write a blockbuster novel

While rooting through my old school junk (so old it pre-dates the internet, compact discs and tipping more than 15%) I found a story called CLAWS that I wrote using my Smith Corona portable typewriter. I typed it out on small-sized paper to make it look like a paperback. Maybe I had a dream of binding or stapling it all together when done to further enhance the illusion. I dreamed big back then.

CLAWS was inspired by Jaws and more importantly, by the 1976 Jaws ripoff, Grizzly. Basically it was a monster movie as written by an 11 year old. I considered myself pretty good at spelling but apparently I was not so good at hitting keys on a typewriter. This would be reinforced twenty years later when Mavis Beacon caused me to curl up on the floor in a fetal position, vowing to never touch anther typing program ever again.

What I’m saying is there are a lot of typos, even just on the first page included below. This is what happens when your spelling checker is an actual dictionary and your delete key is waiting for you 15 years in the future. I give myself props for getting “its” right, though.

Reading it over, I’m struck by the staccato, Hemingway-like prose, sentences delivered like quick machine gun bursts.

The year was 1956.
It was an April morning.
It was a savage animal.
But would this stop the beast? No.

Too bad so many of the sentences appear to be in random order. Or maybe I was making a statement on the unpredictable nature of nature.

It’s like watching someone throw clay then realize that “throw clay” is an expression, you don’t literally throw it, so they go pick up the clay bits from the other side of the room, come back to the pottery table and then fashion together something that has all the required elements of whatever it is they’re making (probably an ashtray), but with everything about it just slightly wrong because let’s face it, they already threw the clay across the room, they’re probably not destined to make great art here.

CLAWS: Terrifying. And that's just the typos.
CLAWS: Terrifying. And that’s just the typos.

But man, did I ever know how to end a first page. How it fought to live in man’s civilization? You have to read on to find out what happens. I picture CLAWS trying to fit in at boarding school. “He keeps mauling the other students,” Miss Pennington said. “It’s just not proper.”

March 2016 writing plans

To be revisited on March 31 to see if I was being a big fat liar.

  • continue to write daily posts to this blog or at least write daily something (forum posts and grocery lists don’t count)
  • do at least one writing exercise per week or if I’m hot ‘n heavy on something bigger, do one every two weeks
  • complete one new short story (I actually have an idea for this, I just need a few more details sorted out before diving in)
  • start work on completing another story for Pairs of Shorts
  • dive back into Road Closed if I feel I’m ready (this will depend largely on everything above)

Now that I’ve written all of this out, I have to do it. It’s the law of the Internet or something.

Five minutes of Fred thinking about death

The article on Wikipedia defines free writing thusly:

Free writing is a prewriting technique in which a person writes continuously for a set period of time without regard to spelling, grammar, or topic. It produces raw, often unusable material, but helps writers overcome blocks of apathy and self-criticism.

I’ve never been entirely sold on this technique, though I appreciate its goal to stimulate any sort of writing, which is presumably better than not writing when your goal is to write. I don’t mind having unusable material. I’ve certainly written plenty of stuff that was either cut or buried out round back. It’s not like you can do it wrong. Kittens have never been killed due to free writing, not to my knowledge, anyway. Where’s the harm in giving it a whirl?

And so here’s five minutes of free writing.

Fred always wondered what happened when you died. He figured it couldn’t be good because no one ever came back to say stuff like, “This Heaven place is awesome!” On the other hand, maybe post-living was so awesome that everyone who died was having too much fun to come back and rub it in the face of the living. Or maybe you evolved to a higher plane and ended up with a superiority complex and couldn’t be bothered to speak to lowly organic forms of life.

“Oh, yes, I knew them when I was mere flesh and blood, but there’s no way I could ever communicate with them again. We exist at profoundly different levels. I see the ever-expanding cosmos, they see Walmart flyers and what a great deal ketchup is this week. We have no common frame of reference.”

Fred thought some more. His Uncle Joe died at age 62. A bit young–shy of retirement age–but he couldn’t really picture Joe as evolving to a higher form. The guy could barely dress himself without putting his pants on backward. How could he become one with the cosmic firmament? He wouldn’t even know what cosmic firmament was. “Sounds candy ass to me,” he’d say.

And what if you killed yourself? Would you just snuff out in a ball of negative energy? Would you evolve sideways into something not-quite-cosmic? Fred couldn’t get past the idea that killing yourself was cowardly.

And stop. There it is, five minutes and 241 words of Fred contemplating death, raw and unpolished, just like Fred himself, whoever he is.

(I fixed the typos because typos bug me. Actually, it’s not the typos so much as the angry red squiggly lines underneath them.)

I just checked the CBC site. So far no word of kitten deaths as a result of this exercise. I consider this a win. Now I shall absorb the fruits of my labor to write something magical and exciting.

Tomorrow.

The Big Writing To-Do 2016, Step 1: Tidying up UPDATE

I have gone through the many folders scattered hither and yon (but mostly on OneDrive) containing my writing and have organized everything into three main folders:

All Writing – current
All Writing – old
All Writing – non fiction

The folder names are pretty self-explanatory. Anything in the “current” folder is something I think is worth working on, though if I’m feeling whimsical/desperate I can also pull from the “old” folder at any time. I have further divided the folders into subfolders for easier sorting–short stories, plays, novels, ideas and so on.

Now that I have done this I need to start writing again or something.

The Big Writing To-Do 2016, Step 1: Tidying up

The best way to start writing again is to start writing again.

It seems obvious because it is. It’s accurate, there’s no real room for argument. Stephen King doesn’t think about writing books, he writes books. James Patterson doesn’t think about writing books, he…well, actually, Patterson may just think about writing books and BOOF, a book appears. I’m not sure how else to explain the sagging shelves in bookstores loaded down with the thousands of novels he has put out.

But for most of those who write, the process is a matter of sitting down (or standing up if you have one of those zany standing desks, or even walking around if you use the even zanier approach of writing via dictation device) and doing it. You do it regularly, you make it a habit, you slowly improve and the process continues until Oprah declares your book the next selection in her book club and you sell a boatload of copies and revel in your brief moment of fame and fortune.

But it all starts with that first step.

Which I am not taking this week (writing on the blog doesn’t count, I’m talking about writing fiction here and as much as I like to stretch the truth in the name of entertaining, this blog is mostly about actual events and things, not ones I have concocted).

Instead, I am beginning with a series of small goals–laying the groundwork, easing into things, making excuses. Well, hopefully not the latter.

The first goal, to be done before the end of the week, is to go through the many scattered folders I have filled with many versions of stories, in various states of completion, and condense them all down into as few folders as possible. At the same time I will relegate older versions of stories, alternate version and anything that doesn’t qualify as done or an active work in progress to a single folder that will be backed up and then lovingly pushed aside.

I’ve wanted to do this sort of organization for awhile and my hope is that the process will help clear out some mental space and allow me to get a better sense of what I have that’s worth keeping while hopefully providing inspiration for what is yet to come. If it doesn’t work, I’ll just go back to reading Marmaduke* and give up on writing permanently.

 

 * see, it’s funny because he’s such a big dog, lol

Questions about writing

Some parts of the writing process are pretty straightforward–you put down words, taking care to organize them into sentences, paragraphs, scenes and chapters (assuming you’re working on a novel) in order to tell some kind of story. Other parts seem less sharply defined, perhaps a reflection that each writer tackles these other parts differently.

But still, I wonder, and so I ask:

  • How much of the first draft remains in the final version? 50%? 20%? 0.5%?
  • If the percentage above is low, is it because major chunks of the story get chucked/reworked or is it because sentence after sentence is meticulously altered?
  • How many drafts does a story usually go through?
  • How often does the writer know how the story will end before writing the ending?
  • Do most writers write the story in order or do they jump around scenes and assemble them later?
  • How often is stuff tossed in because it sounds neat, resulting in the writer later having to go back to make the neat stuff fit the rest of the story?

And probably a whole lot more. The big ones are the first two.

Any writers that are not spambots are welcome to chime in.

Random story ideas

Here’s a few story ideas off the top of my head. The intention is for these to be more useful than funny, unlike my writing prompts. I’m going to try using one of them if it speaks to me. You know, like, “GET OFF YOUR LAZY BUTT AND WRITE ME INSTEAD OF LOAFING AROUND AND DREAMING OF DONUTS!” And yes, in my mind the story prompt would yell at me like a bad stage actor.

Ideas:

  • the initial stage of the afterlife of someone (with possible non-stupid twist)
  • the world changes in subtle but disturbing ways for someone
  • strange messages start appearing on a phone or tablet 
  • a giant alien mothership arrives and then nothing ever happens 
  • two words: ghost jogger 
  • and a few more that I will add later because it’s late, I’m tired and falling asleep