600 Words

I set a goal last week to begin writing 600 words a night. This was to break the dry spell of not writing for a few weeks.   It doesn't seem like that many words at all. I imagine the reaction to that goal going something like this.

"Six hundred? Why not a thousand? Two thousand?  Surely if you're planning on writing novels, short stories, and keeping people entertained you can put together more words than that?"

When I think like that I can understand why authors like George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss get annoyed at their fans at times.  I'm not saying that I am in any way comparable to those men, but I happen to enjoy their works.  I love Kvothe, and I think the television series is going to ruin the books for George R. R. Martin.  What I'm saying is that writing is more difficult than most people give them credit for.

Putting together one thousand words and making sure they work takes time.  Making sure your plots that you establish early in the book deliver on the foreshadowing is a pain. If that wasn't bad enough there are days where something is wrong in the story, but when you're up to your elbows in plots it's hard to see what is wrong.  If you've never tried to write long stories, then here is your challenge.

I challenge the casual readers, the people who are out there looking for something more exciting to do than waiting on their favorite authors next book to drop, to write a 600 word story.  It doesn't seem so bad does it?  It's not like I'm asking you to write an eighty thousand word book like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer Stone. In fact there are children's books which have less than one hundred words.  An example is I'll teach my Dog a lot of words by Micheal K. Firth.  The book is one hundred words, and it tells a story.

The reason I'm recommending this is because I gained a new appreciation for the books that I read once I started writing.  Seeing the way they used their words, weaving plot, killing characters, twisting and turning details to keep me guessing, became more satisfying. I looked at the works of other authors as study guides to improve my own writing.  Questions came to my mind: How does R.A. Salvatore plot a fight scene? How does Stephen King plan one of his "Powder Keg" books like Needful Things or Under the Dome? How much research did Orson Scott Card do before he wrote Ender's Game or did he research?  Does Brandon Sanderson plot a single book or an entire series at  one time?

If you don't want to try the challenge, that's okay.  I'm going to keep chipping away at the projects that I have.  I am working on two short stories for different anthologies that I'm hoping to get a spot in. I have a novel I'm rewriting because after two years I've finally realized what is causing the problems in the story.  Then I have the serial update, each of which take 4-5 days at 600 words a day.

Also, if you're counting words this post is 550 words. Seems like I need a few more for tonight.

Thoughts on Writing

I was recently loaned a copy of "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Orson Scott Card.  As someone who enjoys writing and has read many of his novels I figured I would love to read what he had to say. I've enjoyed Stephen King's "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft" and found David Farland's "Million Dollar Outlines" to be a great learning tool.  Going into this new book I secretly wanted to read more about Ender's Game.

I can honestly say that I haven't been disappointed and have learned something early on about the series I love.  The idea for the battle came to him in the mid-late sixties yet he didn't write it until the mid-seventies.  How many of us can't remember where we put our keys? How often do we misplace something we were just using? Yet to remember and develop an idea for over almost ten years is amazing.

I've had a few ideas which have stuck with me and developed for a while. The idea for the villain of my serial "A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing" came to me while I was driving to Oregon almost six years ago.  The villain, which started off as a truck driver/serial killer, felt stagnant.  It was an observation which came to me about the Twilight movies which gave the idea roots.  It was a complaint that I had due to the lack of variety in some of the classic horror movie monsters.

At that time the major horror bad guys seemed to be zombies, vampires (twilight being an exception to the horror part), and ghosts. As an avid D&D player I know that there are many different types of undead.  Ghouls, wights, liches, and other spectral menaces. This seemed to work well with the traveling serial killer, someone who was afraid to stay in one place for fear of being discovered.  A creature moving among us that none of us would like to meet in a dark alley. I was struck at how well his own ideas seemed to mirror my own, the idea needing time to get its own legs and develop before becoming a story.

Another thing which he said, and something that I can really agree with, is that you have to define the rules of your world. If there is something which can kill your villain, then you need to know it.  If there is a fantastic element whether it be magic, super science, or some perpetually reappearing monster, you need an explanation of how it works.  If you don't pay attention to these details the story won't hold water or carry the readers attention.

I have a novel which is currently unfinished with the working title Legacy.  In Legacy, there is a fantastic element that I was developing as I was writing.  I never sat down and defined it, I said it was a "trickster spirit" or a "creature of chaos" and left it at that.  Now I'm at a fulcrum point into the story where I will be building into the final climax of the book but it's stalled.  The problem is, these spirits were still fuzzy to me. It is hard to write what you don't understand.

It wasn't until I was reading this section of his book that I realized this was the problem. It has been two or three months where I've been unable to work on that and I couldn't figure out why.  But my writers block is due to my own negligence. Had I put my ducks in a row at the beginning of the story, then I wouldn't have suffered this now so close to the end.

The overall point that I was going for in this blog is a lesson I seem to need to learn again and again.  Sometimes we need to read something we normally wouldn't.  I consider myself a horror writer, so reading a book about Science Fiction and Fantasy didn't seem like a fit.  Yet by reading a book that a friend handed me I was able to solve a problem. It doesn't hurt to get out of your comfort zone, to take advice that you didn't know for certain if you'll need. I think I'll take this advice and look for other words of wisdom from other sources.  Perhaps read some non-fiction, or a cook book, or perhaps even some classic literature.  Something new to add to take me out of my comfort zone, who knows what I'll learn. Hopefully it will be something I can apply to make myself a better writer.

The spring becomes a fountain.

It seems in our world that more and more we worry about running out of resources.  We're going to run out of fossil fuels, trees, animals, oxygen, space, and just about everything else you could conceive of.  But it seems to me that there are a lot of things that we'll never run out of.  

There is something about what we do as humans that is amazing, if we work at something we get more of it.  The more I run the more distance I'll be able to do next time.  The more I lift weights, the more I'll be able to lift in the future.  The more I eat, the more I'll be able to.  (All right, that last one wasn't the best example)  

It is surprising that we see physical achievement and improvement as different than mental improvement.  Society seems to have the idea that you can improve your muscles, improve your stamina, or improve your physique.  Yet when it comes to your mental improvement your intelligence isn't as important. 

What if the problem is the perception of the world is it is better to be physically fit than mentally fit?  You could be the worlds strongest man if you work out enough, but you can't be the worlds smartest man because you weren't born a genius or a prodigy.  If we were to work towards changing the picture of society that instead of valuing bulging biceps and a washboard abs we instead valued someone who could solve calculus differentials.  What kind of a picture would it create for us?  

I suddenly see beer commercials where engineers, and scientists are flocked over by women.  I see a Chess Championship as something which draws as big a crowd as the Super Bowl.  It is an interesting picture of the world, where it's not survival of the fittest but survival of the smartest.  

Why did I go through this long rant?  Because I've been amazed at the changes that occur in a mind when you begin to work towards something and practice at it consistently.  In many writers circles they talk about you need to write every day.  That the important thing is that you continue to train your mind in order to produce the ideas and to form the stories in the way you want them.  

Ten years ago I made my first attempt to write a story as a novel.  It came down to three pages of pencil written words that seemed to gloss over ideas but never really explored them.  It was a fantasy story that I felt I could write and would explore a world where reality is based entirely on some kind of group consensus.  That was when I first realized that writing was hard and set it aside. 

There are days that I wish I would have kept at it, where I should have pushed the story to five thousand words, to ten thousand.  I would have something that I could look back at now to see how much I've improved in my writing.  Instead it took me another five years before I finally put words to paper in any concentrated effort.  

Now I can look back and see Creativity is like a muscle, the more you use it the more ideas come to you.  The more you work at formulating sentences, at devising plots, and at crafting characters the better they become.  

There are times that I look back at decisions that I made in my life and regret them.  Regret that I didn't realize that if you want to accomplish anything in life you can't take the easy route.  If you want to write, put your butt in a chair, your fingers on the keyboard, and start writing.  Like with sports, if you want to get better you need to practice.