The Fountain Pen

It’s November and NaNoWriMo is in full swing. A co-worker of mine is participating for the first time this year, and chatting with him has given me occasion to reflect on writing, my process, NaNoWriMo, and why I’m not participating this year. To be honest there is a small part of me that wishes I was in amongst the crowd of people furiously pounding away at their keyboards desperately trying to keep their word count up so they don’t fall too far behind. I loved the sense of camaraderie, knowing that you are not alone, and that people are there to cheer you on. In looking back at the two times I did NaNoWriMo I have a few things I can say I learned.

A Rough Draft is Important

I don’t know when or why I decided that I was too good for a rough draft, but it was somewhere during my school years, probably sixth grade which was the first year I can remember actually getting to write short stories for our English classes. One thing that NaNoWriMo helped me see is the value of having a rough draft. Due to the relentless pace most of what I had to write was below my standards, but I needed the word count, so I was happy to prattle on and on about the most stupid stuff, just because it got me closer to my goal. I knew I was going to have to edit it out later, and I would make notes in the margins to that effect. But something happened that I did not expect.

Somewhere along the way my mediocre prose started showing promise. That wasted conversation that I thought was good dialog only insofar as it was extra words, suddenly turned into character development. My story started having a stronger structure to it and a greater sense of depth due to the all the other silly things I was adding in. The dialog was still too verbose, and I still had to remove the kitchen sink during editing (which I’m sure I’ll get to one of these days) but forcing myself to write things I would have normally rejected before writing allowed me to see the promise and potential I would have otherwise prematurely aborted. It’s easier to cut things out of a rough draft than to insert new things.

My Inner Critic is My Enemy (sometimes)

I am a perfectionist’s perfectionist. I wish that were mere boasting. Some years ago I took a personality profile (the DISC Profile) and among other metrics it will ascribe three adjectives and mine were “perfectionist”, “perfectionist”, and “perfectionist” (this compared to another guy taking the test with me only had one of his come up “perfectionist”; lucky guy). Some people have hailed it as a blessing, and I see their point, I on the other hand am intimately familiar with how much it is a curse, especially when it comes to writing.

I have this critical voice inside me analyzing everything I do, say, and think, and that works against any kind of a rough draft process. I’m usually editing while I’m writing, which worked great all through school, because you can do that with essays and research papers; writing fiction is different. Rather than write about what already exists, or make a logical argument for a particular philosophical position, fiction is a work of creation. I spend my professional day writing code, and it too has aspects of creation to it, but the main difference is I have been trained to accept that refactoring code is an acceptable practice. Somehow my inner critic remains silent while I’m writing code, and is satisfied with writing a draft copy and then to iteratively revise it.

I am finding that while my inner critic will motivate me to make sure my writing is the best it can be, there is a time and a place for it, and the rough draft is the wrong time and place. The same holds true for the brainstorming and outlining processes, and I am trying to convince myself that the rough draft is just an extension of that process.

I Need Structure

Despite my need to quell my inner critic I cannot escape the fact that I need structure to my stories. The first time I did NaNoWriMo I had a detailed outline. I had six pages of plot points one after another, in an outline format, each one taking up no more than one line. I never got through the entire outline because there are probably three books in that one outline, however, when it came time to write I knew exactly what I wanted to happen, in what order, and I had a clue as to why. The second time I participated I drew up a looser outline and got stuck after just a few days, and I only wrote 13,000 words. I got stuck and I’m still stuck with the story.

I’m finding that even with the short stories I write that if I do not have a clear picture of how the story unfolds I get stuck in a hurry. I used to think I struggled with the plot and finding good plot points, but now I think it’s more that I’m working against my natural tendencies. When I do any programing I have some kind of an outline document or project specification that I go by, and all the architecture is done there; all the hard questions, all the little details, all the bugs and assumptions are thought through first before I even start programming. It works wonders for me with programming, and I’ve come to accept that I need the same level of detail when it comes to writing fiction.

This doesn’t mean I don’t give myself the freedom to write an impromptu story without much more thought than a brief exchange with a buddy over IM, but it does mean I will be less frustrated with my stories and make better progress if I first know where I intend to go, with whom, why, when, and how. I don’t have to follow the plan exactly, but having one at least gives me something to start with.

Relax and Enjoy

When I am frustrated I can’t be creative. If I am stressed or anxious my creativity cramps up and nothing happens; I’ll fight the story, I’ll fight with the characters, and nothing will feel natural. I’ll only write a few words and end up discouraged. Conversely when I am relaxed I have found that the words flow without effort and I can easily double my word count; not only am I more productive but I’m happier with what I write and I’m less likely to want to attack it with a red pen. I’m still trying to figure out how to pull this off consistently, but more than anything else it’s an attitude. Either I decide to enjoy the process of writing and see where it takes me, or let myself get frustrated and give up.

The reality is bad days happen. They are not a reason to give up, instead I should adjust my expectations of what I’ll get done, and spend more time trying to figure out how to unwind and then re-start. I found that it was important for my momentum to at least do something on the bad days, but it was more important that I let myself have a bad day and then do whatever was necessary to have a better day next time. In the end perseverance paid off, and if I worked at it I could spend more time relaxed while writing then uptight; it is oxymoronic but I have found I do have to work at relaxing, but the creative benefits are tremendous.

Creativity Begets Creativity

I’m still not sure how it works out, but I have noticed that when I engage in a creative process it sparks ideas and inspiration along the same vein and suddenly I have an overabundance of things I’m excited to work on. It has held true when I try my hand at graphic arts, game design, and at writing. If I just get out and write, even if it’s less than mediocre prose, I’ll often get hit with all kinds of inspiration for stories, more than when I just sit and brainstorm for ideas. This is one thing that makes doing NaNoWriMo worthwhile, for if in writing for one month solid I can also fill a notebook with story seeds I will have gained something I could not otherwise possess.

In the years since I have done NaNoWriMo I have not always had an idea that I thought was worth pursuing, and yet during NaNoWriMo I was constantly fighting with myself to stay with the story I was working on and just make notes on the other stories that kept invading my brain. What I learned, and forgot, is that during the dry spells I need to just write, even if it is an exercise or a disposable story; doing so I will often come up with a better idea I will be excited about and then I can work on that. In order to write I must write.

Create a Writing Habit

NaNoWriMo taught me a lot about myself as a writer. More than anything else I think that is the biggest gain from the process. Even if you will never make it to 50,000 words fight through to the end and see how far you get. The best thing you can do is get it done, keep some notes about how it is working out for you, or how it is not, and regroup later to figure out how you write. There is one thing, though, that NaNoWriMo cannot teach me, and this is the main reason why I am not participating this year.

My first attempt was in 2004 and I’ve not yet finished the full rough draft of that story. I hit the 50,000 word goal, but I still have more than half of my outline left. I was so tired of writing that I took a few weeks off, then a few weeks turned into months, and then when I did want to get back to it I forgot where I left off. One day I hope to return to the story and finish the draft, and then edit the beast. The pace NaNoWriMo set is not a reasonable pace for me. Sure I can write more than 2,000 words in a day; I just wrote a 2,300 word short story, on a whim, all in one day, and had it complete before my daughter woke up from her nap. But the main issue is one of time and priorities.

I have a few important responsibilities in my life, and they will always take precedence, and I cannot always make time for a two hour writing session. I need to establish a more long-term writing habit. I still don’t know what that will look like, and I’m toying with things here and there. I doubt writing only one night a week will keep things fresh in my mind, but I know I probably cannot commit to an hour a day. This is the biggest weakness in me as a writer right now. I do not make the time for it, and while I can convince the people around me to cut me some slack for a month while I try to write a novel, I cannot do that every month indefinitely. Once that problem is solved maybe I will once again join the frenzied fray of frantic fiction folks flinging furious fingers for fun.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I grew up with stories; when I learned to read I consumed as many stories as I could. Somewhere along the way I wanted to tell my own stories and write them down. Somehow that goal was never quite true, for I also wanted my stories to be complete, and somewhere I got it in my head that a story is not complete unless it has been published. I am beginning to question that: what does publishing do?

I used to think that publishers were a sort of filter but I have books on my shelf that flagrantly violate the rules of grammar and I’m utterly shocked; I was taught that we should use complete sentences, and every sentence must have a verb. Some authors and publishers disagree. So this cannot be true: bad books get published.

I have also caught myself thinking that publishing in some way validates a man or woman as an author. Put another way, you aren’t a “real” author until you are published. Does publishing validate the writer as an author? Am I something less if I never sell a book to a publisher? Does self-publishing not count? Does self-publishing only count if I function as both a publisher and as an author, and publish authors other than myself? And if publishing does validate, does a small-press count, and if so, how small can I get away with? Here’s a good one: do you have to publish to paper, or can you publish electronically?

Some time ago I concluded that being published means only one thing: your particular story is marketable. If a story is published that means that some person (or persons) believed they would be able to sell the story for a profit. It does not guarantee a fan base, although it probably does guarantee that a few people will at least read your manuscript.

As someone who would love to call himself an author I really only care about one thing: I want an audience. I’ve given up on the idea that I’ll ever make a living at writing. I have a day job, and that is consistent with all the writing advice I’ve ever heard. So if I only care about having people read my writing I’m seriously wondering why I still have this pipe-dream to one day be a published author, although I now no longer know what that means, nor what it would mean.

What does it mean to be published, and what does publishing do?

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I made a personal discovery last night: I finally know what it is I like about H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, and by extension what I like in the horror genre. For a long time I have been trying to figure out what I like in these stories and what it is that draws me to Lovecraft that does not draw me to other horror writers. At first I thought it was just that Lovecraft wrote “weird fiction” but that is too vague a category to be of any help at all. While some may argue that what I’m about to say would be an inaccurate summation of all of Lovecraft’s work I would like to point out that this is the element I like about his stories (and thus his stories that lack this element are not among my favourites).

Lovecraft’s stories are detective mystery stories. The stories I gravitate to are the ones where something unexplained has happened and now the protagonist will go about figuring out what is going on. It is the same reason I like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and a host of other detectives. What I like more about horror mystery-detective stories is that the story is not about a murder and a who-dun-it.

So now I know. I like stories where something inexplicable has happened. An impossible thing has occurred and our protagonist will seek to uncover the truth. She may be an unwilling protagonist, caught up in an event far beyond her ken or control. He may be an intrepid investigator on the trail of a great mystery, soon to engulf him in a world of madness. They are tales of the bizarre and the unreal, but made real, and told to reveal the mystery (but not quite!) in a detective sort of way.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The good news is I hit my goal of 2,000 words for tonight, and even better, I had time left over to relax and watch some TV. That was the good news. The not-so-good news is in a few different forms. First of all, my writing program of choice decided to stop counting words after it reached 354; so while I was hammering away well beyond 1,000 it still read a paltry 354. I’ve sent a little message to tech support to see what they have to say, and I suspect this is a Leopard induced bug. The second issue is one I was afraid would happen and is the reason I am not sharing my story: the tone is all wrong.

If I am to hit 50,000 words this month (and really the story should probably top out at 40,000 words) then I’m going to need to just write. But since I want to write a weird fiction tale in the vein of Lovecraft I need to pay attention to mood, tone, and atmosphere. Already I’ve had to eschew those things for the sake of getting the skeleton of the story down “on paper”. This means, that as I suspected, I will need to edit the story (probably more than once) before I’m willing to let people read it, because the tone and atmosphere are really supposed to be important.

In the end, if starting a project is the hardest step then I’d say things started well. I was a little distracted trying to figure out the word count issue, and if the developers cannot fix it soon I’ll have to spend time and effort switching my writing software. Hopefully I can cope until a patch is made available. Two thousand down; forty-eight more to go!

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have decided to write a Lovecraftian story for NaNoWriMo this year, and as if that were not enough of a challenge the protagonist is a woman. Not only will I be conscious of atmosphere, pacing, tension, and suspense, but I’ll need to maintain a believability in regards to how a woman would act in the situations I’ll be putting her in. This should be interesting, and my wife has offered to help me out, to which I am grateful.

Continue reading "Welcome to The Shrouded Asylum" »

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I threw my hat into the ring for NaNoWriMo earlier this month and I am now happy to say I am as ready and prepared for it as I can be. This afternoon I completed my outline and while that puts me at ease I am a bit concerned. This year’s outline is the most detailed I’ve ever done, and while it’s also one of the longer ones I’ve come up with I’m not sure if I have enough of a story to hit the word count. Time will tell, and if I finish my story early I’ll either have to concede defeat or blather on intending to cut it December first. I can now safely rest the rest of October!

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A thought struck me tonight. Most writers understand that few will be able to write full-time and pay the bills. It seems to me there might be some corollary about not writing for money (or writing in the expectation of money), for it is not likely you will earn enough money from your writing to satisfy you. Stated another way: We only have a finite amount of time per diem, and in order to allocate more time to writing one must be compensated enough so that one need not consume time merely earning money.

I will state for the record that I am not interested in writing as a business. I write stories that I want tell, not stories I think I can sell. Granted, I would love to have a wider audience, and I acknowledge that people read published material more readily than “unpublished”. There is a balance in there somewhere, but if I am ever to make money at this little hobby of mine, that will be a bonus, and probably will not affect anything in my life.

What I really wonder, is how all this will play out in the future. The Internet is full of vast possibilities, and if I were happy with an audience of 100 faithful fans it seems all to trivial to accomplish that in light of the Internet. This of course needs more thought.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got this crazy idea while working on a story. What if we were to think of our stories as a sequence of conflicts which in turn serve to resolve The Conflict of the story? Sounds like a no-brainer to me; in fact it sounds like the way we tend to write stories; I’ll go further and say we do write stories that way, but rarely so consciously.

So now I wonder how my stories would differ if I were to think of my stories as a series of scenes, each one having a conflict that drives it, and each scene resolving it’s conflict and progressing to the next.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve had a couple of potential writing exercises kicking around in my head, only I don’t like them much. One would be to take an “underwritten” (one that lacks much detail or dialog or whose pace is too fast) fairy tale (hopefully somewhat obscure, so as not to hurt any fan feelings) and use it’s outline and re-write it. The other would be to take a fairy tale (again probably not a popular one) and re-work its atmosphere so as to make it more of a ghost story than a fairy tale.

I have two reasons for not liking either of these. The first is this sounds more like work than fun; in this case I’d be working on the craft and not the art of writing. The second is my general distaste for re-tellings; be original for crying out loud.

This does not mean I won’t do either of these, the second one appeals the most as it seems the most helpful to me, but it does mean I probably will not share them and will despise myself at some level for stooping so low. (Can we see why I don’t write much?)

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lovecraft once said, “Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction.” I’ll go one step further and state: good weird fiction (and good horror fiction) lives or dies by its atmosphere. I’ve given this much thought over the past couple of weeks, in fact I haven’t stopped thinking about it, and thus my conclusion as stated. I have spent my last couple of weeks reading as much “horror” short stories as I can, and when I cannot I listen to those I can find on the Internet. Some have been “professional” (as measured by being published in a for-pay magazine) and others have been “amateur” (as measured by being given away as free online). This latest bit of reading coupled with my memories of reading ghost story collections as a kid has led me to agree with Lovecraft.

There are a good many weird tales out there which I have passed over because they lacked impact; they fell flat; they were uninteresting. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve thought about those stories that did grab me and those that didn’t and did a quick mental comparison. I found that the essential story in either case was not all that different. Even the most atmospheric ghostly tale is still quite banal under a microscope. The deciding factor was the atmosphere.

In my opinion really good weird fiction will have it’s own atmosphere, and will not require you to create your own. I have read such stories, and it’s a bit of a thrill to sit in a parking lot in the middle of the day and still feel the foggy, creepy, haunting atmosphere of a story.

If I may speculate, I’ll suggest that this aspect of “horror” literature is what makes it so difficult to write (and if you write horror in order to scare I think you’re doubly challenged). I can be more relaxed about atmosphere in my sword swinging fantasy stories, and atmosphere is not what people generally look for in a good sci-fi yarn. Yet when a story will either fall flat or resonate with the audience due in part to the atmosphere, frankly I find that a bit of a task. In all my writing classes not once was setting stressed beyond plot or characters, nor was atmosphere really discussed.

There is more to a weird tale or a horror story than at first glance. I have more respect for those authors who write them well.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)