Week Nine, Monday

Cheery, huh?

Look, most neophype scribes go through a "suicide = profound" phase. It doesn't mean every writer is depressed. We're just inward-looking people who have to work out some stuff, clear our collective throats if you will, before we can start working on things that are not, well, this.

And anyway, the subject matter doesn't necessarily make a story clichéd. It's what you do with it. So there.

The completed story can be found here!

Week Nine: Microfiction week!

So here's the deal: these "weeks" are taking longer and longer to complete (Week Eight, for instance, was almost four months long), so for Week Nine we're going to try something different...

MICROFICTION!!!

(This is my caffeinated time. You be quiet.)

Microfiction (also called flash fiction, short-short stories, etc.) can be 200, 100, even 50 words long. After putting you all through a story 6000+ words long, I figured some brevity was in order.

This will also give me an excuse to fly through some of the more... I don't want to say "clichéd" but... beginner ideas I had during my freshman year. 

So! One a day, Monday through Friday. Get 'em all here (links will be added as they are posted):

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Reflections on Week Eight

[Read the completed story here!]

This one nearly broke me, folks. These past almost four months between final story and when I first posted the prompt have been a crucible of self-doubt, resolution, procrastination (i.e., poor impulse control), tentative starts, running around in circles, revelation, and finally just plain unrelenting hard work.

I've said it before, but this is the longest work of fiction I've written since grad school. And, I think, the first since maybe high school where the point of the story wasn't profound meaning and verbal pyrotechnics but just to tell a story.

So, y'know, breakthroughs a-plenty this week. Or "week."

I want to talk a little more about this revelation, though, because there was one thing in particular about Dean Wesley Smith's blog post that made the difference, and that would be Dean Wesley Smith himself.

Because I am trying to be a more active citizen of the blogoverse, I had posted the following in response to another comment where the person was worried about their writing speed:

Same here! My eyes bulged when I read that Dean averages 1,000 words per hour. I’m lucky to average 200–300, and all of those words are hard won.

What steps are you taking, Christopher? And I’d be very curious to hear if and how others have managed to boost their word count without sacrificing quality.

I was hoping for a discussion, some pointers, maybe. But pretty quickly I had a reply from Dean himself:

Hey, Brandon, what is “quality?” If you mean without sacrificing writing from the English teacher part of your brain, then you never will get faster than a few hundred words per hour. But if it means just letting fly and writing from the creative side of your brain, that all comes down to just typing speed for many of us.

To which I gleefully responded:

Hi Dean, thanks so much for taking the time to respond personally! I certainly struggle with censoring the inner editor—learning how to just let fly would definitely improve the output. Maybe it’s a matter of experience, but I find myself getting bogged down in the minutia of this fantasy world I’m writing in but haven’t fleshed out yet. (The idea was to let the rough draft direct the shape of the setting, but then there’s Is there an official town guard? What about plumbing? Clothing? Currency?)

What I’d love to know is how much planning/outlining there is before you feel free to rely solely on the creative side. When writing 1,000 words an hour, how extensive is the revision process?

Thanks again!

To which he... did not respond, because he's an incredibly busy person and, really, he already told me what I needed to know. The big revelation here was the words "typing speed." That I could actually give myself permission to write fiction at the same speed I chat or write emails blew my mind.

Between making a commitment to spend at least five hours a week putting new words to paper and this new "typing speed" approach to the first draft, the last several thousand words of Kyra's tale came pretty easily. All those questions about the world I had previously found so paralyzing were easily answered once I had built up momentum. I trusted that no mistake was so great that I couldn't fix it later. And to respond to my own comment, the revision process was not any more extensive than it was before. I was shocked to find that I liked most of what I had written, and that my many starts and stops did in fact cohere with the sprint at the end.

So that's that. In summary: it was hard work, but I am elated to have done it.

Next up, Week Nine!

Week Eight: Fantasy-ed!

Week Eight's completed challenge can be found here!

This is the first true short story I've attempted since graduate school. In writing it, I had to overcome a number of self-imposed stumbling blocks that have kept me from attempting something just like this for many a year now. Basically, I had to get over myself. 

And the result...? Well, you decide.

Please, I would love some feedback on this one. What worked? What didn't? What do you hope to see more of? You can comment on this post, or on the story itself, or contact me directly. 

As I've mentioned, the intent here was to better flesh out one major character of my theoretical fantasy series. It took some time (you may have noticed), but, having done this, I truly believe that things will get easier from here. I feel... accomplished.

Anyway, check it out! And I've hinted before (and the story itself has a disclaimer on it), but there's some dark stuff in there. I don't want to upset anyone, but I also don't want to spoil the story, so please contact me if you want to know what exactly that dark stuff is before you read it.

Reflections, and Week Nine's several challenges (microfiction week!), to come this weekend.

Week Eight: Prepare yourselves...

Shockingly, my editor gave Week Eight's story the stamp of approval with very few notes.

So!

Nearly four months after I posted the prompt, you can expect the results of Week Eight's challenge to be up on this site either late tonight or early tomorrow morning.

I should mention now (and I may actually include a disclaimer on the story itself) that it goes into some pretty dark territory. Reader discretion is advised.

And I promise to limit Week Nine to an actual calendar week (instead of a thematic one). Oh man. These prompts are going to be so painfully awkward. It's gonna be great.

Are writers just a bunch of whiners?

From Esquire, a different perspective on the current state of publishing:

Writers have always been whiners. For nearly a hundred years, since at least the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the death of the novel has been presaged. And now, egged on by BuzzFeed and video games and just general hypercaffeinated, e-mail-all-the-time ADHD, the book is apparently, finally, about to die. At least we'll have good stuff to read while we wait. This fall alone, the number of big books published by major writers is astounding: Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and about a half dozen others. Not that the list has stopped anyone from complaining. Literary circles have been so full of pity for so long that they can't accept the optimistic truth: We're living in a golden age for writers and writing.

Read the rest here!

Week Eight: Revision in progress!

Quick update: the revised draft of Week Eight's story is with my editor (girlfriend). Spent a couple hours last night after work making some longhand revisions. I highly recommend this approach: your writing just looks different on paper, making it easier to see the writing as writing rather than as the sacred work you labored over for many weeks. 

I also did that thing that several "how to" books recommend you do (and about which, of course, I have gleefully read but never actually tried), which is where you pull out pages and group them by character, or theme, or whatever. In my case, having written this thing over several months, and very quickly at the end, I hadn't actually read the whole story from start to finish. I was afraid that I had repeated a few emotional beats, and wanted to track the protagonist's growth over the course of the story.

So anyway, being able to see what Kyra realized on page 8 and then again on page 10 made the subtraction part of the revision process much easier. (And being able to cross out large swaths of text via fountain pen is very satisfying.) The end result is, I hope, a much more polished draft that reads like an actual short story.

But we'll have to see what my editor says...

Week Eight rough draft: DONE!

6,714 words. That's the longest story I've written in a very long time. 

Tomorrow, we shall see if it can be edited down into something someone someday would want to read... (I guess I'll also have to give everyone in the story names.)

But, for tonight, I'm just jazzed that I actually finished this thing. It was not easy, but I suspect (and don't hold me to this) that it's pretty solid for a first attempt at daggers and nobles.

New year, new approach

Let me wish you all a (slightly belated) new year! 

My resolution is to write at least 5 hours a week (half an hour Monday through Friday, and two and a half hours on Sunday... Saturday's for doing nothing), and during that time, to push for 1,000 words an hour. It sounds kind of impossible, but it actually feeds into something else I've been avoiding: allowing myself to write shitty first drafts.

Per Dean Wesley Smith, whose blog I am stealing this approach from:

How to set production goals

FIRST STEP… even if you are writing pretty well already, take an inventory of all the time you spend every day for three or four sample days. Doing everything.

Every minute in fifteen minute chunks. Do a log. And be honest. And also record your mental state during the time frame. For example, up at 6:30 but too tired to think until 8:30 and two cups of coffee.

After you have the log, figure out how much writing time you have.

Add in reading time, research time, and so on.

CAUTION!!!  Writing time is only writing time, creating new words only. Rewriting, researching, reading, taking a workshop is not writing time. Be clear on that because if you start to blur those lines, you will discover your new word production has decreased.

[...]

SECOND STEP… Keep time over a number of writing sessions how many NEW words you get done in an hour. Round that to a general number per hour. For example, I write slower at the starts of stories and faster at the ends. So the general number I use for myself is around 1,000 words per hour. I tend to be comfortable with that and many professional writers I know are in that range.

Find your own range and be clear on it and don’t tell us. This is for you to figure out for yourself.

THIRD STEP… Look at all your writing time from step one and your word count per hour from step two and figure out how much you could write in A PERFECT WEEK.

Divide that in half and that is your writing goal of new words per week.

Example: So say with your day job and kids, you can carve out ten hours per week of actual writing time. Divide that in half and if you write about 1,000 words per hour of new words, you will be producing 5,000 new words per week. (5 hours x 1,000 words = 5,000 words per week.)

Take two weeks off and you get 50 weeks x 5,000 words or 250,000 new words per year.

That’s just five hours per week.  That’s how you write a lot of words.

If you can manage to actually write ten hours per week of original fiction, just over one hour per day, you would produce a half million words of fiction in one year. (And you would be called one of the fastest writers in publishing if you worked that one-plus-hour per day for a few years. Not kidding.)

Read the rest here! (And be sure to read the other three parts in this series. Go ahead—some great Friday inspiration for the writerly soul. Dean knows his stuff.)

So I'm not setting my goal exactly as outlined (I haven't, for instance, sat down to figure out where every spare block of time is hiding in my day), but what's been working for me for the past week or so is to get up just a half-hour early every day and use that time to see if I can plop down 500 words.

That's it. Half an hour. 500 words.

The big revelation, you have probably already guessed, is that when I do this I'm finally, finally doing what you're supposed to do with a first draft: Get it down and fix it later. I've known since I first read Bird by Bird (probably 10 years ago now) that you can't let yourself worry about perfection when the creative brain is engaged, and yet I've continued to do precisely that—I'm forever tweaking what I write as I write it. 

BUT! With this approach, this speed challenge if you will, I really have no choice but to push past imperfection. The critical half of my thinky thing just doesn't have time to engage. Naturally, I'm still worried that what I'm writing is irredeemable crap, but this fear is steadily abating, to be replaced by wonder at the sheer number of words this seemingly endless story has now amassed: as I write this, 5566 words. And I'm guessing another 1000 before the first draft is actually done.

Is it good? Not the point. Maybe it will be great. Maybe it'll be... um... a learning experience. The point is that I actually have no idea whatsoever if this story is any good.

Not a clue. 

And that's pretty liberating.

Conflict!

From Janice Hardy's The Other Side of the Story, some great advice about pacing and plotting your story:

1. Use all three types of conflict:
Your hero should have a difficult internal conflict, relational conflict with other characters, and an external conflict against his environment or circumstances. Developing all three strands of conflict gives your story depth and keeps your reader constantly invested in reading more.

[...]

4. Pacing: 
The pacing of conflict in your story should look like this: Conflict Simmers » Conflict Boils » Conflict Explodes » Breathing Space » Repeat as necessary.

5. Pacing #2: 
All of that simmering, boiling, and exploding should look like peaks in your manuscript while the breathing space looks like valleys. Your peaks should get progressively higher and higher as the story nears completion. If you have two or three peaks in a row that are all at the same level of risk/intensity/stakes, you aren’t at a peak. You’re at a plateau, and you need to reassess those conflicts and figure out how to escalate them.

[...]

7. Have inner and outer conflict meet: 
When your hero’s choices in how to face his outer conflict lead to increased inner conflict (isolation, fear, guilt), you’ve done a good job of escalating the conflict.

Read the rest here!