Showing posts with label Musings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Musings. Show all posts
Thursday, June 16, 2016
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.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Short stories versus Novels
I love to write short stories. It seems that every time I want to try something new that is where I turn. There is something that is lovely about a short sweet story that lets you explore a new idea or style. When I wrote my short story Rapture it was to try to help cope with my recent loss of a beloved family pet. My story Save the Last Dance was a trial of meshing a dystopian story with a contrasting image. In the case of this story it was the song and dance of Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly.
While I love to write short stories I have found that I struggle to read short story collections, anthologies, and even those in magazines. I find it refreshing to sample something small without committing to an entire novel. It's like the free samples at the grocery store, all the flavor with none of the obligation of buying a twenty pound box of frozen tacos. Yet if you have too much of the same subject, writer, or style it can become stale rather quickly. This is why I can go through a novel in a week yet it can take me up to a year to get through a short story collection.
So as I was sitting at home sick this last week, unable to write, unwilling to read for fear of my brain acting up with fever dreams, I had something to ponder. I began to wonder why it was that the short story collection I was working on still had at least one hundred pages left, I'd only been reading it for about a year. In the same time I had read probably at least twenty novels, if not more.
The conclusion that I came up with is that there is a thread of continuity in a novel which keeps us reading. While a chocolate sampler is nice from time to time we generally have recipes and foods we eat weekly. We go back to the same treats, cakes, or dishes that makes us happy time after time. This is what the novel does, it prepares us something that we like just with some new developments, twists, or characters.
Let's use macaroni and cheese as our example as most people have polarizing feelings towards it. There is something nostalgic about going back to our childhood with hot dogs and mac and cheese. You can dress it up by making it from scratch, adding four, six, even eight types of cheese. You can throw a curve ball at us by adding something like bell pepper, bacon, or even some sun dried tomatoes to the mix. In the end though it is still something we know and are comfortable with deep down inside.
When you look at the stories of your favorite authors many of them fall into very similar plot patterns. These are our comfort foods, the foods for thought. For Stephen King I'd say it's a slow burn horror, the story builds pressure like a pressure cooker, and in the end you are never sure if you'll find the ending really satisfying. I know the characters are going to be well developed, and that I will find myself passionately questioning whether they really should have made key decisions. I love Stephen King and when I'm in the mood for something like this it is the first place I turn. Yet even when I find a collection of his like Four Past Midnight or Different Seasons I can't seem to read straight through it.
There is something to be said about the beauty of a novel. When done right it'll make you turn pages in the way an anthology won't. When it's done you feel satisfied and can walk away happy (most of the time) as though you'd just left an all-you-can-eat buffet. You've had your meal and you don't have a bunch of stuff still on the plate, as it often is with anthologies. The story is ready to be digested and you can start deciding what you want for dinner.
With this revelation I'll probably still read short story anthologies, but I won't plan to get through it as fast as I would a novel. Sometimes you just want a sample, sometimes you want the full meal.
While I love to write short stories I have found that I struggle to read short story collections, anthologies, and even those in magazines. I find it refreshing to sample something small without committing to an entire novel. It's like the free samples at the grocery store, all the flavor with none of the obligation of buying a twenty pound box of frozen tacos. Yet if you have too much of the same subject, writer, or style it can become stale rather quickly. This is why I can go through a novel in a week yet it can take me up to a year to get through a short story collection.
So as I was sitting at home sick this last week, unable to write, unwilling to read for fear of my brain acting up with fever dreams, I had something to ponder. I began to wonder why it was that the short story collection I was working on still had at least one hundred pages left, I'd only been reading it for about a year. In the same time I had read probably at least twenty novels, if not more.
The conclusion that I came up with is that there is a thread of continuity in a novel which keeps us reading. While a chocolate sampler is nice from time to time we generally have recipes and foods we eat weekly. We go back to the same treats, cakes, or dishes that makes us happy time after time. This is what the novel does, it prepares us something that we like just with some new developments, twists, or characters.
Let's use macaroni and cheese as our example as most people have polarizing feelings towards it. There is something nostalgic about going back to our childhood with hot dogs and mac and cheese. You can dress it up by making it from scratch, adding four, six, even eight types of cheese. You can throw a curve ball at us by adding something like bell pepper, bacon, or even some sun dried tomatoes to the mix. In the end though it is still something we know and are comfortable with deep down inside.
When you look at the stories of your favorite authors many of them fall into very similar plot patterns. These are our comfort foods, the foods for thought. For Stephen King I'd say it's a slow burn horror, the story builds pressure like a pressure cooker, and in the end you are never sure if you'll find the ending really satisfying. I know the characters are going to be well developed, and that I will find myself passionately questioning whether they really should have made key decisions. I love Stephen King and when I'm in the mood for something like this it is the first place I turn. Yet even when I find a collection of his like Four Past Midnight or Different Seasons I can't seem to read straight through it.
There is something to be said about the beauty of a novel. When done right it'll make you turn pages in the way an anthology won't. When it's done you feel satisfied and can walk away happy (most of the time) as though you'd just left an all-you-can-eat buffet. You've had your meal and you don't have a bunch of stuff still on the plate, as it often is with anthologies. The story is ready to be digested and you can start deciding what you want for dinner.
With this revelation I'll probably still read short story anthologies, but I won't plan to get through it as fast as I would a novel. Sometimes you just want a sample, sometimes you want the full meal.
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