Tag: writers life

I’m Terribly Lazy at Plotting

I’m lazy. I don’t want to write more than I have to, and when I write, I’m hoping things will work out eventually… Not so! At least not when you are developing your backstory – everything that happened before the novel starts.

In my novel, I was kinda hoping I could just have the spirit of an evil witch that lived on an island without having go back too far who she was and how she came to be a ghost! But I have to… I have to plot it out until it makes sense, then I must write a story about her, just in case I missed anything or new things occur to me, because what I learnin the beginning is everything. Everything before the story happens has to make sense before I can get the real story rolling. I’m hoping that if I do that, I can make up the novel as I go because I know I have a solid foundation.

by Stamphers

Wasting time writing

What is the story about?

It was about something, now it’s something else…

Why can’t there be an easy story to write? Why do I need to do a trial and error to nail down what the story is about?

I can’t… I just can’t continue writing, because all of a sudden, it’s different from what it was before. All that work feels wasted, like, there must be a better way to do this…

I don’t care that it might be a master piece eventually because it is not worth spending so much time on stuff that you never gonna use.

Am I a perfectionist or is it a learning curve? Will it become easier over time or am I doomed to write and abandon stories because they will eventually stop making sense…

I never plan, it seems counterintuitive to plan out something you know nothing about. A story takes form as I write about it. Perhaps I need to do both? Just write then plan things out; write and plan over and over until it make sense… The characters grows, the plot grows, I grow.

Or maybe I’ll just have to pick a story where I have something to say… I have some of those. Why haven’t I picked them out before…?

by Stamphers

LoTR and Info Dumps

The biggest problem with writing fantasy stories is that we have to present a whole new world organically without overwhelming readers with names and places. Tolkien has an interesting way of presenting his world which I don’t think many have tried to emulate since. He does something that is generally frowned upon in the writer’s world today and that is he stops the plot by giving context to his places. This might seem like a bad idea but I think this is extremely vital to do in a fantasy setting. It usually goes like this: The heroes reaches a new place and then Tolkien gives some context to the history of that place and what the people living there are like through narration. One example is his introduction to the people of Bree, why there are both Humans and Hobbits living there and that it once was a an important crossroad town.

What’s so genius about this is that Tolkien can show a world and tell about organically because he makes us care about his world as we explore it. Many writers dumps a lot of information about places that the reader, and often the heroes, have never been to.

Why should we care?

Another important thing that most fantasy authors don’t do, I think, is that they fail to give context, or history, to small places, places that does not necessarily involve the main plot. Often the heroes just visits a town, something happens there, and then they move on. It’s just a nameless town with nameless people, a plot device. This makes the world hollow and forgettable, I believe.

Is there other ways one can convey the same information? You could use dialogue but I find it highly unlikely that the history of the places the heroes visits would come up in conversation very often if they are on a quest to save the world.

I don’t know about you guys, but if I would journey across the land, I would like to know a thing or two about the places I visit. Today we have the internet, but decades ago, people would have to pick up a history book, and that’s how LoTRs sometimes feel like, a very entertaining history book.

by Stamphers

Writing Simply is for Children?

Finding a style that works for you and for the readers is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. I dream of a future where I can write something smoothly, meaning my style is set, I know what I can do and I’m good at it. But to reach this goal you need to know what you want and to read a lot of different kinds of books. I had a hard time reading children’s stories before because I thought they were very slow, but once I slowed down myself, and didn’t try to finish the story as quickly as possible, I find the story much more enjoyable. Also, I learned something:

In children’s stories, they really write simply, yet I can see exactly what they imagine. perhaps not exactly but they give me enough information to imagine for myself. In most other fiction, especially fantasy, everything is described in minute detail and doesn’t give much room for my own imagination. Why is that? Is it because adults don’t have imagination? Is it because adults expect books to be hard and children’s books to be simple because children are simple?

Who knows, I often think that books on the fantasy genre is a slug to read but never children’s stories, they are boring for other reasons, sometimes… Maybe one can use the best of both worlds, somehow?

 

by Stamphers

Show or Tell, Both.

There is no doubt that you have to write down everything that happens to a character, whether it’s in the past or the present, because you, the writer need to have a clear idea what lead the character from point A to point B. But that doesn’t mean what you write will end up in the story at all! All those scenes that you have worked so hard on will sometimes never be shown, it will be shown implicitly through your writing. You will hint that they have happened, these scenes will appear in a conversation, never fully explained, but it doesn’t need to be. The reader only need to know the consequences of those scenes and will create new scenes with more depth, because you know more than the reader.

On the other hand, this does not have to be true at all! It all depends on the story you are making. A children’s tale, for instance, can have layers of depths, but that doesn’t mean everything is shown, but rather told, in a concise manner. It’s neither boring or superfluous because the charm of the writer bleeds through a narrative. People that read such stories know what they get into. Others will be put off by it, but that doesn’t matter. You write what you like to read, what you find fun writing and other people will find your style appealing because you like what you do.

by Stamphers

Let me Indulge!

I have so many ideas it’s crazy… I’m super excited when I have them but I feel like I cannot start on a new project before I finish the first. But exploration is what I love about writing… And I’m wondering if maybe I could allow myself to indulge in these new ideas a bit before I continue on the main project – you know, to see where it takes me…

I feel like I need to do something with them, in any case, at least to find out if I should discard them or not. There’s not reason for me to work on stories with vague ideas or stories that I have difficulty to move forward with when I have so many to choose from.

If I explore ideas while I have them, I might be able to make a call which ones I want to go back to on a later date.

What do you do with your ideas? Do you get them everyday or just occasionally?

 

by Stamphers

Stay True to Yourself

Have you ever come across the notion that writing in first person is bad? Of course, people can like whatever they want but I suspect they don’t like it because they were told to. Somebody told them that adverbs are bad, that cliches are bad while they themselves have never encountered these cliches themselves. Writing in first person was very common at the turn of the 20th century, which is why I believe they think it is bad because it is old, or maybe it is the industry that suddenly decided that this form of writing is bad, arbitrarily telling the readers that this is not what you want, like short stories and novellas, people don’t want that, they say. There’s no money in those and I suspect that first person stories tend to be shorter as well… But I’m not here to investigate this but tell you that I love writing in first person.

When I write stories, they tend to concern one character, the story has to start somewhere and that means the protagonist is the only thing that matters, at first. I tend to write without reason, there’s no logic at play, no plan, but it ends up coherent anyways. As if I’m not making a story but rather finding one which I’m trying to convey.

There is merit, however, to listen to industry visdom, because you do want people to read your stories, but that doesn’t mean you should abandon yourself, because if you are not true to yourself you are not true to your stories. Such stories are dull and they will chip away at your heart until you hate writing. I want to enjoy the process of writing, that’s my goal, and if nobody likes what I write, that’s a shame, but there are limits to how much I’ll change to please others.

by Stamphers

Writing a Novel is Hard…

I’ve come to realise that working on a novel is hard, I know, right, shocker! Nevertheless, I had this illusion that I could make anything rather smoothly, thus, whenever things got too difficult I jumped to another project. The logic was that I would return to it once I learned how to write. Though it is true you get better with practise, I think my naive outlook (or overconfidence, perhaps) made me never finishing a project once it got hard. There’s merit to finishing something even if it’s not perfect, after all.

I honestly thought that I was inadequate because it got hard, or because there was something fundamentally wrong with the story itself which made it impossible to finish. I hoped that once I got better, I would be able to finish any story without difficulty. Though it is true that you get better, there is absolutely no excuse not to finish a project you started. Which is why I’m sticking with the current story – Fairbanks Island – no matter what. I’m going to finish my other stories too, one after the other, no matter the end result.

With this in mind, I’ll try to be more picky about the stories I choose in the future. There are so many ideas that I want to explore which I’ll never be able to in a lifetime; and sense I’ve accepted that stories will be hard to make, I’ll only choose those stories that really excite me! Something meaningful and worth the readers time beyond simply to entertain.

I hope your writing is doing well and if you are not a writer, hope you enjoy my stories which you can find, here. Consider following if you like what you read!

by Stamphers

Let the Story Happen

For those that write on intuition, do you sometimes find it difficult to continue writing on certain parts? Like you hit a wall when before words flowed like water? I often wondered why that is. It’s not like I hit the dreaded middle point or anything, it’s too early, or too late for that to happen.
I personally think it’s because that certain parts are not supposed to be. If you’ve written parts of the story already, chances are that you have a plot in your mind and you try to make the characters reach those points. For planners, or whatever they are called, I call them planners, that’s perfectly fine, but for those that rely on intuition, that is how a story die.
I recently read Stephen King’s book On Writing and he says that plot just happen. I have to agree. You cannot force your characters to do anything, at least I can’t – they struggle…
I have tried a lot of ways to write but I think the way I find most enjoyment from writing is when I let go. I clear my mind and make it a point to never use anything I’ve already written. I will rewrite the story over and over until the characters stop struggling.
I don’t know if this will produce particularly good stories. There are many things one must consider when making a story, but if it flows easily and doesn’t resist, I think that’s a good foundation to expand on.
by Stamphers

About Stories and Doubt

I’m gonna be frank, I’m rather angry at myself… You know as a writer (or an artist) you get excited over a project? You work it in your head, for a little bit, then you write it down in a first draft, all easy, all fun! But somewhere along the way, the story just doesn’t excite you anymore… I don’t know why this happens, why, at a certain point, it gets so hard to finish what I started?

I had a story, written about 4-5 years ago which I finished in 6 months. I had no experience at all about writing and didn’t know what I was doing, but I finished it, and I had fun. Then I showed it to other people and I realized that I couldn’t write for shit. I absorb their critique, I really did, and it helped, to a degree. I wanted to prove that I’ve become better and I wrote a short story. I really liked it, and people liked it too, at certain parts.

They didn’t like the ending, specifically, and even though I thought it ended where it should, I tried to find more of the story when there was nothing there. (I guess it was the best kind of critique, they wanted to know more, after all) but I think it was then doubt started to seep into my mind. I tried so hard to make the story the way that they wanted, but in the end, I could not finish it.

It broke me, I think, because I haven’t been able to finish anything since; nothing longer than a thousand words, anyhow. I honestly began to think that if I worked on a story too much, I’d ruin it, much like I did with my short story. Which is silly, everything you do makes the story better, you are building it, one word at a time. But I cannot shake this doubt. In my head, the story I’m now working on is ruined and is beyond salvageable.

I really want to believe that what I write is better than I think it is, which is why I’m gonna try something.

I don’t care how awful the story turns out, I need to finish something! No matter how awful I think it is. I need to believe that every word is an improvement, or at least one step closer to finding the story, or the fossil, as Stephen King would say – I really recommend his book On Writing.

So here’s the deal: I’ll be posting everything that I write, unedited, on the same day I write it. No matter how little, or how much I end up doing, it’s gonna get posted. I’m effectively gonna spam my own blog with garbage! I hope you’ll bare with me, but I understand if you choose to leave.

 

by Stamphers