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.
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:
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.
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.
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
I find I write best on this blog when I tackle a topic early in the day or evening. If I wait until mid-evening, say, I’m already shutting off my brain for the night and planning non-thinking activities like sleep* or watching amusing/strange cat videos. But it is difficult for me to jump in early because when I get home from work I am almost always mentally tired (I work in technical support). I usually have dinner shortly after getting home and after that there is a small window between brain-still-active and brain-go-nap where I can start writing with some energy and enthusiasm but more often than not I find my brain simply doesn’t want to participate.
This concerns me because I think I have some talent when it comes to writing and could improve on it with practice. As Stephen King put it:
While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
I am competent for the most part, even if I often feel I get it right through dumb luck or some other process I can’t fully explain or even understand, but I realize that the hard work and dedication King speaks of are lacking. It’s easier to slouch back in my chair and passively let myself be entertained until it’s time for bed and then to dream I’m playing with Fleetwood Mac (see below).
I’ve read a few books on writing over the years, some of them focusing on the nuts and bolts of the craft, others more inspirational. King’s own book “On Writing” has left me fired up each time I’ve read it but the fire burns fast and hot and before long it’s embers and then ash. I need to find a way to keep the fire stoked.
And there is no book or magic trick or sure-fire technique for this. It’s just dedication and hard work. I need to find that within me or just move on to other hobbies, like This Couch is Very Comfortable or Tonight I’m Going to…Nah, This Couch is Too Comfortable.
I made the first step last August when I promised myself to write every day. With only a few exceptions due to unusual circumstances I’ve stuck to that and it has helped to instill some of the discipline I need. But it’s only a first step. The next step is to turn this discipline toward my fiction writing, which has been largely moribund for the past half year, a few days during NaNoWriMo excepted.
I’ll try this week and report the grisly details here. It may be fun. It may even be better than a comfortable couch.
* I recently had a dream where I was playing guitar with Fleetwood Mac. They had another guest performer on stage and he announced the next song would be “The Baboons” or something like that. I was concerned because I was not aware of any such Fleetwood Mac song. When the band started in I quickly recognized it as one of their familiar hits and jumped in, at which point the strap on my guitar broke. I awoke before finding out if I dropped the guitar on the stage, produced an unholy shriek of feedback and had Lindsey Buckingham exclaim, “I love it! Keep it!” because remember this is the man who wrote “Tusk.”
Technically I didn’t forget since I’m writing this and it’s still a few minutes before midnight. I was all prepared to write something fascinating, had the blog composition window open, and then got distracted fooling around with Word and WriteMonkey. I think I’ve decided to go back to WriteMonkey for Road Closed because a) it’s already in WM format b) I’m used to WriteMonkey and c) I’ve discovered a few more handy WM features I can use for the novel.
engadget is described as a “news, reviews and opinion outlet with obsessive coverage of cutting edge gadgets, consumer electronics and the science and technology they’re built upon.”
The news, reviews and opinions are all presented in a chronological list without much to differentiate one from another apart from the title of the article. I read the site on a near-daily basis and appreciate that it takes a lighter and less technical approach to electronics and gadgetry than, say, anandtech.com and its half dozen pages of benchmarks illustrating how the latest Android phone is slightly better or worse than other phones at rendering blobs and bits.
Reviews and opinion pieces on engadget are always going to have a little more personality injected into them, but I’ve noticed lately the writing of these pieces seems to be skewing more informal, with some resembling forum posts rather than something you’d expect of a professionally written article.
Take this opinion piece How would you change the Nintendo Wii U? I’ve included the entire thing below, not because I’m a plagiarizing so and so, but because it’s quite short, as its main intent is to foster forum discussion (which does not justify the tone used, in my opinion):
The Wii was, undoubtedly, the success story of the previous console generation, encouraging millions of novice gamers to wave their arms around like a crazy person. The Wii U’s big gimmick, touchscreen gaming, made plenty of sense, considering the quantity of mobile and DS users out there, but it never seemed to take off in the same way. Launching well ahead of the Xbone and PS4, the general opinion of our reviewer was that it simply wasn’t ready for the big time, and sales seem to have backed that up. A year has passed now, so it’s high time that we asked you what Nintendo should have done differently? Sign up at the forums and talk us some change.
I realized as I was reading this I was mentally editing it. Here’s the version I cobbled together (with mark-up, such as WordPress allows):
The Wii was, undoubtedly, the success story of the previous console generation, encouraging millions of novice gamers to wave their arms around likeacrazypersonpeople. The Wii U’s big gimmick, touchscreen gaming, made plenty of sense, considering the quantitynumber of mobile and DS users out there, but it never seemed to take took off in the same way. Launching well ahead of the XboneXbox One and PS4, the general opinion of our reviewer was that it simply wasn’t ready for the big time [without substantiation or at least a link, this assertion is meaningless and should be rewritten or removed], and sales seem to have backed that up. More than aA year has passed since its launchnow, so nowit’s highis a good timethat we askedto ask you what Nintendo should have done differently.? Sign up at the forums and talk to us aboutsome changes.
Cleaned up and with a previous engadget article linked that shows the poor sales of the Wii U:
The Wii was the success story of the previous console generation, encouraging millions of novice gamers to wave their arms around like crazy people. The Wii U’s big gimmick, touchscreen gaming, made sense considering the number of mobile and DS users out there, but it never took off in the same way. Launching well ahead of the Xbox One and PS4, Nintendo was forced in January to slash sales expectations of the Wii U for 2014 from 9 million to 2.8 million. More than a year has passed since its launch so now is a good time to ask you what Nintendo should have done differently. Sign up at the forums and talk to us about changes.
Is this better? Sign up on this blog and let me know.
I decided to put together a spreadsheet that would finally collect together all of my various writing projects from over the years.
I left out anything that was little more than a sketch or idea. It had to have at least enough substance to count as unfinished to make the list. I also left out all of the treasure of my youth that were scrawled in crayon, written with a leaky fountain pen (they all leaked) or made via the incredible clatter of my portable Smith Corona typewriter, which looked very much like this one (yes, it was blue and it was awesome…at making a racket):
“I can’t hear you, I’m creating art!”
In the end I was somewhat surprised to have sixty stories listed, ranging from finished copies suitable for publication/framing/lining bird cages to others that were little more than a few rough scenes desperately clinging to life. Fittingly, one of these is a short story called “Writer’s Block”.
I’ll edit this post to go into a bit more detail about the genres and so on soon.
Back in the old days writers used to face hazards like getting lead poisoning from pencils, being stabbed by critics with ivory-handled fountain pens or getting eaten by a bear, as writers would often be forced to write outside to have sufficient light and bears were pretty much everywhere back then.
By comparison today’s writers have it pretty easy. We have computers to write with. We have delete keys. We have indoor lights and doors that can lock and keep out bears. But there are still perils to writing, even in this modern age of flying cars and zero calorie sodas.
This week I could not work on my writing on my lunch break, even though I took my laptop with me to work every day and it was in perfect working order. What prevented me from writing? Was it a sudden zombie apocalypse? Did aliens blanket the world with rays that prevented the normal operation of all electronic devices? A little of both?
No, it was perhaps worse than these things. The wireless network was acting flaky, forcing me to use my laptop in scary offline mode. Suddenly the world was at my fingertips but instead of offering a bounty of knowledge and diversion it offered stony silence. Not to mention plenty of “this page cannot be displayed”. No big deal normally (lie) but I keep my writing in the cloud, specifically the very popular Dropbox. With no wireless access my Dropbox folder was inert. Sure, I could have made my important stuff available for offline mode but that sort of planning (like outlines) is for losers.
The thought of writing something entirely new from scratch this early in the new year was too frightening and so I simply ate my lunch and listened to ABBA. Somewhere Harlan Ellison was laughing at me as he finished another handwritten page in one of his many legal pads.
But you wait. When the zombie apocalypse does arrive, what do you think will be more effective in braining a zombie? My computer or Harlan’s legal pad?
