Post #146 November 26, 2018

“Where Do You Get Those Crazy Ideas?”

In answer to the question above, I have a one-word answer: everywhere.  Ideas are the lifeblood of any storyteller and memorable ideas are particularly valuable.  Even a cursory look at the mechanics of storytelling should convince you that the basics haven’t changed since Og and Grog grunted at each other across a campfire in 1 million BC.  Have a memorable hero, give him a problem or put him in danger, twist the screws so that the danger gets worse, then our hero either overcomes the problem with heroic efforts or fails magnificently.  That hasn’t changed since humans became humans and started talking to each other.

What has changed are the ideas, the subject matter and some tweaks to technique.  Oh, and the media have changed as well, what with printing, radio, movies, TV, Facebook, Twitter, the coming of the ebook, etc.  But the basics of good storytelling really haven’t changed.  Why?  ‘Cause people haven’t changed that much.  Culture and technology change.  People…not so much.

I gave the title question some thought recently and came up with these answers to where do I get my crazy ideas.

1. Ideas come from life.  By this, I mean life as it is experienced or lived.  Say, you develop a close relationship with the bag guy at the grocery store.  You know he wants to get into the Army and you both have a great interest in military history.  Pretty soon, some of his life becomes material for a story.  Or he becomes a character in a story.  It’s happened to me.  All you need to gather ideas and material for a story from life is something that anyone has: curiosity and the ability to ask questions.  More specifically, you need the ability to look at a situation or a person and see the story possibilities in it.  Not every incident has story potential but many do and some can be expanded into a story.  I know someone in my Sunday school class who was born in Prague at the start of WWII and whose first memory as a child was being snatched off the cobblestone streets of Prague right in front of a Nazi tank.  Tell me there’s no story possibilities in that.  Be alert, be curious, and ask questions. 
2. Ideas come from other writers and their stories.   How many stories have the Star Trek and Star Wars universes spawned? Probably beyond count.  It’s okay to read another writer’s story, and see additional story possibilities in it.  Most writers don’t mind that, though some may be a little protective of their fictional universes.   This year, I had a game designer in California contact me about collaborating on a gamified version of my series Quantum Troopers.  I don’t believe anything will actually come of this but it is interesting. Often, you read a story you like and it gives you inspiration to take an off-ramp from that story to a world the writer left unexplored.  Other stories can often spark your imagination into flights of fancy, asking what if this happened?  What if so and so did this instead of that?  What if Roosevelt and Churchill had been kidnapped by aliens collaborating with Nazis…I actually considered that as a story once…fortunately, not for long.  Which leads me to…
3. Ideas can come from systematic imagination…extrapolation.  This is a further case of asking what if?  A good example is my series The Farpool Stories.  Way back in the early 1980s. I wrote a story called The Shores of Seome.  It had an oceanic world with a marine civilization of intelligent fish-like beings.  I was never able to place it so it was shelved for several decades.  But I was always intrigued with the setting and the question: how would intelligent fish live and what would their culture and technology be like?  Then I asked what if: what if far-flung descendants of humanity operating a military weapon on this ocean world created a whirlpool deep enough to be a sort of wormhole?  What if the fish people could use it to travel back and forth to Earth?  What if two teenagers saw this whirlpool off the coast of Florida and wound up being sucked into it and catapulted across six thousand light years to this ocean world?  What would happen? How would they react?  Thus: The Farpool.  And it ultimately evolved into five novels set in the same universe.
    
   That little two-word question what if? can be a powerful motivator for your imagination, if you pursue it far enough.  I want to explore the details of what I’m calling systematic imagination more in my next post to The Word Shed.
    
   That post comes on December 3, 2018.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.

Post #145 November 19, 2018

“Facebook, YouTube and Emails, Oh My!  Finding the Time to Write”

I am currently in between writing projects.  Around Thanksgiving, I’m uploading the final title in my series The Farpool Stories.  In early February 2019, I’m uploading the first episode of my serialized 12-episode story called Time Jumpers.  I’ve done the first episode already and will start the second after Thanksgiving.

So I have a little time to relax and decompress. 

Which brings to mind a question every writer asks: how do you find time to write?  I want to address what works for me in this post.

Primarily, finding time to write is an issue of motivation.  What motivates you?  What gets you out of bed in the morning?  What keeps you up at night, mulling over possibilities and options?

I know a fellow named Tom.  He’s not a writer but he’s surely one of the busiest people I know.  Multi-tasking is his middle name.  He drives full time for Lyft.  He attends daily to a wife who has a serious disease.  He attends nearly daily to an aging father in declining health, now in a nursing home.  Oh, and he’s also president of our Sunday School class.  How does Tom even find time to breathe?

Here are my rules for being able to carve out time to do something like write.

1. Make it a daily thing.  Pick a time.  Stick with it.  Writing should be like exercising.  Even like flossing your teeth.  You do these things because you know you should and you like the results.  As a writer, I enjoy seeing the pages mount up.  I always print what I’ve written that day.  As the pile gets taller, I feel some pride and sense of accomplishment at seeing that.  I get a bit of a rush…by God, I’m a writer!  Here’s the proof!  But the most important thing is to pick a time and a place and stay with it.  Preferably every day.  Make it like brushing your teeth or showering.  If I don’t put down 3-5 pages a day (and I give myself plenty of time off as needed), I just don’t feel right.
2. Set a goal.  I’ve alluded to 3-5 pages a day for my own schedule.  That’s 15 to 20 pages a week.  Assuming a genre novel is around 200-250 pages, that means you can have the satisfaction of completing a draft in about 3 ½ months.  Does that mean the job is done?  No, of course not.  There’s still editing, re-writing, cleaning up the prose, marketing stuff, etc.  But it does mean you can bang out maybe 2+ books a year.  That’s a clearer path to success than waiting for the muse to strike.  Take my advice: don’t wait for the muse.  Blast ahead and put words down on paper.  Even if you have to edit them later.
3. Give yourself permission to slide a little but feel bad when you do so.  Glory in the guilt.  This may be controversial, but in my experience, we live in a feel-good time and if you have worked out a schedule and a discipline that works for you, and you don’t do it, you’ll feel bad when you’re not doing something writerly every day.  If and when that happens, you’ve climbed an important motivational hill.  You’ve made putting words so much a part of your daily living that you can’t envision a day when you’re not doing it.  I have become so good at motivating myself that occasionally, I find it hard to turn myself off.  That can be bad too because it can lead to burnout.  But remember: nobody’s making you do this.  You have to make yourself do it.  And one way to accomplish this, is to understand what motivates you to do something hard and isolating and not always initially rewarding.  Hopefully, the results later will be what motivates you but everyone is different.  Examine what works for you, set up a schedule and stick to it.
4. Keep a record and celebrate meeting your goals.  When I finished The Farpool: Union, I gave myself a few days off and then we went to the beach.  My kind of reward.  When your work is (finally) done, reward yourself.  Have lunch with friends.  Buy a bunch of books.  Go see a movie.  Hike in the mountains.  Whatever is rewarding.  And then get back to work.  In between works, I make myself spend a few hours in the office every day.  I might be developing outlines for a new story, developing character bios, researching or just day-dreaming.  But I always go back to my schedule and begin the process all over again.  And when I see the downloads mounting up my author’s dashboard on Smashwords, that’s pretty good motivation for me to continue, because it means somebody out there thinks enough of my work to download it.
    
   Finding time to write is really about knowing yourself, as (I believe) Socrates once said.  Writing is a solitary art.  Only you can motivate yourself.  Motivation theorists tell us that it’s the rewards at the end that provide a lot of motivation.  If you believe Maslow’s theories, then that puts writing somewhere around love/belonging, esteem and self-actualization. 
   That’s good enough for me.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on November 26, 2018.  In this post, we’ll look at where writers get their crazy ideas.
    
   See you then,
   Phil B.
    

 

Post #144 November 5, 2018

“To Outline or Not to Outline, That is the Question”

In my second post to The Word Shed, I said this about outlines:

My outline drives everything, including the people (what I used to call characters), even details of the setting.  From the few sentences I’ve already written, if this idea continues to hang around and doesn’t go away, I begin a process of elaborating and structuring that takes anywhere from a few days to a few months. 

I’m a big outliner.  I can’t write a story without having some idea of where the story is supposed to go.  Other writers try to ‘wing it’, and let the story evolve organically.  More power to ‘em.  I need the structure of an outline.

Having said that, though, doesn’t mean I don’t deviate from the outline.  You deviate when the story pulls you in another direction.  When an idea crops up.  When a character just won’t do what you want.  When there’s a new idea or emotion or conflict you want to explore and dramatize.  There’s nothing wrong with this at all.  But I still write it down.

Reasons to Have an Outline

1. Consistency.  It’s like framing for a house.  It holds the story together, gives it a skeleton to hang scenes on.  A strong plotline is vital to keep moving the story forward, to give the players believability and to keep the reader interested (probably the most important of all).  It’s possible to draw characters who are so compelling that they’re interesting in and of themselves.  But it’s better to give them something to do.  Some critics say plotline is nothing but character in action.  I agree.
2. Keeping Order.  Novels often have multiple plotlines.  John’s story.  Mary’s story.  The trip to London.  The abduction by aliens.  An outline allows you to maintain continuity from one scene to another, so that in Scene 1, John has red hair and in Scene 12 he still has read hair and now two heads.  Novels have lots of details.  Readers notice details.  Outlines help you keep some order among the details so that mistakes and obvious inconsistencies don’t creep in (as much).
3. Keeping the End in Sight.  With an outline, you know where you’re going.  The scenes and conflicts necessary to get there are already established, in theory.  If the ultimate resolution of all the action is firmly set up ahead of time, you’ll find you can write scenes that work toward that resolution, perhaps from different angles and with plenty of complications, but always knowing where you want to end up.  I once watched my dog demonstrate just how powerful his sense of smell really was.  He veered to one side of the street, then another, then back, in ever-tightening arcs until he finally homed in on the target of his interest.  Following an outline to a previously established resolution is kind of like that.  And sometimes the target turns out to be the same thing my dog was after…and I won’t go into any more detail on that.
    
   Reasons to Deviate from an Outline or Have No Outline
    

1. You think up a new plot complication.   Every writer is a crockpot of bubbling ideas.  Sometimes, an idea surfaces that just won’t go away.  Ask yourself: is it believable the character could run into this or experience this?  Does it advance the plot or reveal a side of the character that otherwise wouldn’t be shown?  Would it be neat and kinda fun to have this happen?  If the answer to any of these is yes, go for it!  Just make sure it doesn’t lead you down an off-ramp to some dismal swamp of storyland you can’t write your way out of.  In other words, think it through.
2. The outline is no good.  Ah, now we come to the great Berlin Wall of all writers.  Everything I’ve done so far is mush.  I need to start over.  Well…maybe…maybe not.  Perhaps, you didn’t work out the story details properly in the beginning.  You start to get the feeling that the words in front of you are just words going nowhere.  You’re sure nobody will believe what you’re writing.  You don’t believe it yourself.  Well, don’t despair.  This is why Microsoft Word has an Undo button…or a Delete button.  Trust your instincts.  Where does the story want to go?  Go there.  You might want to jot down a few notes, just in case, just to keep this new plotline on track.  Probably, the original problem is a poorly-conceived outline from the start.  Only you can decide whether it’s worth re-outlining or just winging it. 
3. I need elbow room to grow the story.  Outlines cramp my style.   This is okay, as I said before. Let’s face it: our writerly muses work differently, from writer to writer.  Many writers value the spontaneity that comes from winging it.  They like to be surprised when they sit down to type.  They’ve done enough research and so internalized their characters’ motivations and backgrounds, that they can type away, inside the virtual world of the story, and be confidant that what comes out will be readable, believable and fresh.  There are times when writing works this way for me too.  But for me, it comes from when I’ve done a lot of preliminary work. 
    
   Let’s face, every writer lives for that artistic moment when the story just flows and you can’t type fast enough to get it all down.  That’s when writing is a joy.  But a pro needs to be able to put words on paper (or on screen) when the words don’t flow and still have it all hang together.  That’s why I outline.
    
   The Word Shed will take a one-week hiatus so I can attend to some family matters.  The next post will come on November 19.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.