The current prompts are leaving me dull and uninspired. Seeking creative procrastination: ask me any question about how something works in a storyworld, a why that's been pestering you, or any backstory you just really want to know, and I'll commentfic it.
If that doesn't inspire you, how about a character (original or fandom) and something crazy you would dare them to do.
I did know what froze me up on writing my chaptered fanfics after a while, and it's weird to admit this, but here it is: they were too long.
When I realized it was going to take more than 100 chapters to wrap up some of those stories, my brain and muse froze up and it suddenly became very, very hard to keep writing. It was easier when I didn't realize that and could just scribble into the abyss, not knowing, not caring how many words it would take me to reach the end. I cannot tell you how liberating it is to not know.
And you know what? I think that's what happened to the Story from Inferno as well. I realized how much work and words were involved and almost got over it before my brain went too much, too much, too much—I'm scared.
Some writers write scared. It drives them, keeps them writing. I don't. Never have. Never have been able. Scared freezes up my brainpower and even if I know exactly what should come next, I don't write it. If I don't know what comes next, that suddenly becomes an ultra-handy excuse to let it go and hack away at something else while nibbling every now and then on the overwhelming, too long story. And I wonder why I've only ever finished one satisfactory novel. :shakes head ruefully at self:
There is no commitment to the abyss. It is like life, only visible one step at a time, and with infinite possibilities for continuing or coming to a satisfactory end. We live by moving forward. There is commitment once a story rears itself out of the abyss and shows its overall shape. Suddenly, I feel obliged to make the story fit that shape, reach that end satisfactorily. There's pressure.
I've been thinking about how to take that pressure back off. Cross your fingers for me or share your tips if you have any. It's time to throw a few stories back into the abyss.
So there's a couple of memes that I decided to edit into this: I'm going to post the first lines of all my WIP that have a complete draft but not a revision I like yet. Now to just get some edited!
"You have seven days. Live them."
Jaguar kneels over the small sleeping form of her young brother.
The Collector, Mavren, looked up from the counter when the tiny brass bell tinkled over his opening door.
Here in the land of the five cities, long before the king and the princes, the queen and the princesses, there was an emperor and empress and a little empressina.
Alya carefully creased speckless cream linen over the perfect white parchment of her letter—the way her mother taught her.
Rachelle waited until the restless aches dancing through her upper body were outright pain before she finally forced herself to quit making endless cups of coffee and fished a mottled green star out of the embossed pink tin she kept on the granite kitchen countertop.
Kirana pressed her hand tightly to the young boy's chest, her own chest feeling squeezed as life wrung out from between her fingers and into his body.
Word came at dawn of the newly outfitted military station in Westerfields, that vast uninhabited territory between Glaston and Edyll, both kingdoms cities.
Markus and Shellayne hated each other, but as the only arcana-keeper interns available, they were stuck closing the Library of All Knowledge.
Got any first lines to share?
So following along with Dean Wesley's Smith ghost novel was enlightening, but not entirely surprising. He wrote a 70,000 word book in 10 days.
I've written 4–6K fanfic chapters and short stories in 2–3 hrs, so I know it's possible, but there's that head of steam factor. I have it just as easy as he does when I write into the abyss. I'm not.
There are worlds I know so well inside and out that I can scribble off a piece of them in very little time at all. And some I know so well that I can't just keep on writing past the point I slid out of character voice. That I can't just plow ahead and change history when other stories in the canon have already established the point. That I can't just call a story done when it isn't because it's really just the first level of info I yanked out of a character's head but the details to make it make sense to someone else aren't there yet.
When I'm writing Vardin, Kingdoms and Thorn, Breath even, I'm not writing into an abyss. I'm writing into a world so full I sometimes bump up against the scenery. Nevertheless, that does not make me unproductive.
Within the last three weeks, while I was sick as all get out (and I say this not lightly, y'all; I was sick), I worked on three larger pieces: Dowse and Bleed, the prose version of "History Lesson on the Night Train," and what's shaping up to a novelette/novella size Vardin piece called "By Blood and by Land" about Llereya and Cayden and the whole history surrounding "Hunt the Mists." I've written more than 10,000 words while sick and in less than forty-five minutes a day. I don't feel bad about that.
It's easier when I'm not locked in though. Writing into the abyss is easy. You can make up any decisions on the fly and not worry about the consequences. Which is how I got the first mess of "Dowse and Bleed." That story flew out of my fingers.
The only problem is I was completely unfamiliar with writing mysteries of any kind (mysterious being a different case altogether), and so I hadn't a clue where I was going and let an awesome setup go anticlimactic with the tension draining out as I moved forward. The new version is better to me. It satisfies me because it's truer to the characters, but I had to take a whole break to get the case on straight in my head. (Thank you, in_the_blue!)
"The Alchemist" flew out of my fingers, written in less than three hours, took minimal edits, and it's my bar none bestseller that everybody likes. I like writing into the abyss. I just can't do it often because once that story's down, it tends to grow into a world in my all too fertile imagination.
Ah, well.
Thanks all for your patience as I recovered. See you soon with more stories.
I've been doing a lot of thinkiness in and around battling to keep my baby website afloat (long story; we'll talk about it later) and reading poetry and scribbling in the gaps of work and life and blizzards and emergencies and taxes (let's just not talk about that), and I've been thinking a lot about creating stories.
The story from inferno stalled out on me a while back, almost entirely due to fear that froze up my insides and outsides and made me second guess everything I was doing. But I like Rachelle's story better than Ashen's because even if it's harder, it's cleaner. Rachelle is not pragmatic about killing. It's something she knows how to do, but it's not something she doesn't care about, doesn't feel. Ashen is on a completely different level and her stories feel grayer to me. I'm not sure what to do about that yet, but I'm beginning to understand at a different level why Justus and Red were friends in their before life and now do. not. get. along. At all.
Anyways, I got my okayness on again about the story and figured I could write it now, right? Apparently not. Total stall. I'm only now starting to figure out that where I left off is too clean cut, no trailing lead in to what comes next and that I don't know enough about one aspect of my world. Hmph.
And then there's writing drabbles. They're not in my blood right now like they used to be and I keep looking for shorter ficlets to cram in the holes around my schedule and most of the prompts I got belong to stories that are hitting the sprawl state. Let's just say :headdesk: and leave it at that.
Then there's the mess of fanfiction. I reread my profile and realized afresh how easy it would be for me to dig back in. I have worlds upon worlds that are good and I never finished them. But. My heart is in Vardin and the teams and so. Not a lot of fanfic going on.
Finally, I'm discovering that I'm still an immersion writer. Doesn't seem to matter what I do, I do it in spurts. I find myself writing only two storyworlds at a time for a swath of fic and poetry, then shifting which two, but no more than that. The ideas proliferate crazily while I'm doing it and I have to make notes for stories I'm not really ready to get into. In short, I get full up on a world and it crowds out most of the others. Right now, I seem to be in Vardin and Seven Days or Kingdoms and Thorn. Breath and Faeology beckon, but I keep telling them to wait their turn.
Do storyworlds or types get in your blood and out again? Any thoughts on scribbling ficlets when the muse keeps churning out story ideas you don't have time to work on?
So my wonderful, amazingly fabulous beta, in_the_blue is hosting a writing challenge about a memory from one of your characters. To enter, visit http://in-the-blue.livejournal.com/869821.html. Rules below:
Rules:
Fandom: any fandom, including (encouraging) original.
Word count: Let's do a minimum of 500 words.
Main theme: A memory from your chosen character.
Ratings: No restrictions.
Duration: Challenge opens now (March 29) and runs for two weeks. Closes at the end of day Friday, April 12.
I keep telling people that if they want to become professional writers, most of them are going to end up with the daily-slog system (that is, you write a page or two every day, rain or shine, feel like it or not). Oh, there are a few folks who are burst writers – who can set everything up in their heads in advance and then disappear for a month of 12 to 16-hour days, reappearing only when the book is finished. And there are cyclical writers, who do nothing for a week, then splurt out a 30-page chapter in two days, then do nothing, lather, rinse, repeat.
— "Twitchy, Twitchy" by Patricia C. Wrede
Gacked from likeadeuce:
"Ask Me Questions About Stuff I've Written" meme:
Questions can be along the lines of "What were you thinking when you wrote this?" or along the lines of "What happened to these characters five years later?" or if you don't want to ask a question you can just quote a few lines from something I've written and I'll comment on them.
(The somewhere the middle is getting to will, eventually, be the end of the story. This ought to go without saying, but it’s amazing the number of writers who find themselves heading in some completely unanticipated direction. When this happens, it is usually best to adjust the ending and pretend that is what you meant to do all along.)
— "Middles" by Patricia C. Wrede
Every story can be a wonderful opportunity for the writer to learn. I have learned a lot in the course of writing—and rewriting—"Dowse and Bleed." When I first shipped the 7600 word monster to my beta, she came back with tons of helpful advice, which happened to include this snippet here:
Have you ever read the book Perfume by Patrick Suskind? I don't mean seen the movie, but read the book? It's a murder mystery told from the POV of someone with an amazing sense of smell. That sense of smell absolutely permeates the story. Everything is described with such attention to scent, because that's the predominant sense for the narrator.
I haven't read the book, but I got the point. Immersing inside the character meant taking on the way that character perceived the world. And I finally understand the reflexive reaction my main character, Rachelle aka the Database, has to her world. She holds everything and everyone at bay as much as she can. Why? Because everything in her world is steeped in connections, in unavoidable knowledge of others and her environment, and in pain. It hurts her when she senses too much. In this story, she almost always senses too much.
"Thank you," Killinger said as they stepped through the door onto threadbare carpet in a small square of a studio apartment.
It was crawling with black coats, Core law enforcement officers in traditional garb. The team wasn't one Rachelle recognized: a clean-cut early-thirties detective in the middle of the apartment looking up with a surprised frown at the pair of them and surrounded by five or six male officers and a forensic tech, also male. Killinger's computer tech, Jarod, hunched over his portable on the tiny rectangle of kitchen counter, oblivious to their arrival.
Rachelle handed her coffee to Killinger, who took it, then pulled off her denim jacket to hand that over as well and unbuttoned her overshirt. She curled her lip at how thick the air was with pathogens—influenzas, autoimmune viruses, sewer's plague, and a host of lesser infections.
"Killinger. Who is she?" the detective demanded, his white rank star almost glowing in the meager light of the one naked lightbulb overhead.
Killinger had a badge; Rachelle had a history. She let Killinger walk over to explain in hushed tones the way things worked.
Rachelle went to circle the apartment, sticking close to the walls. Leftways ran the tiny kitchen, all appliances and appliance tops and bottoms for laundry and cooking, sanitizing and incinerating, then that tiny bit of counter. Food and food-related bacteria seemed to stick to her skin where it hit her. "It's a wonder he's not sick and retching," she muttered. Incredible how immune systems in the Squares could be so hardy.
Past the kitchen, the corner and back wall of the apartment were packed with the sorts of necessities that closets and pantries were designed to hold, neatly stacked but overflowing. She imagined thumbprints over all those papers and clothes and bottles of food and dishes and almost curled up on herself at all the human traffic that had marked them with genetic material. Animal entries could have been meat, strays, or pets—no telling.
She moved on in the direction of the bed and a knot of three black coats. One glanced over his shoulder and frowned before hunching his shoulders against her. She almost brushed past the other forensic tech, avoiding him by centimeters and absorbing another smattering of entries with distaste.
Writing the world through genetic material is... strange. I had to stop and research melanin-producing genes to figure out how she worked with that. I have to think about the terms of what she knows about people. She observes as frequently with her eyes closed as open, registering what people could be—and nurture's room for variation—before evaluating what they are. There is no off-switch, only things that help her move through the data faster or seclusion, which reduces the number of new things she encounters.
What happens to a character when simply experiencing the world around them causes pain? It's never explicitly stated in this story—at least not in no uncertain terms—but Rachelle's body is essentially a storage device that's running out of space. What used to be a temporary predicament for her, a need to archive and compress data, is now entering a permanent downward spiral. She flinches from physical contact with anyone new but registers everything that much faster, that much more intently, in an effort to get rid of it as soon as she can.
I've never written a story from inside a sense I didn't have before, but it means that every moment I write a new sequence of paragraphs, I have to stop, think, query her body for what it's up to and what she's feeling. I understand now why she numbs herself out to it when she can, backburners it, reacts by lashing out when she can't. Too bad for Jarod he makes a really good target.
Have you ever had a character with another sense besides the usual five or one who viewed the world through a different sensory lens than yours? Anything you had to keep in mind to make it work?
