I'm sure there's someone who should be given sole recognition for telling burgeoning authors that you always start with the beginning, then you write the end, and then you figure out the middle. It makes sense. The best jokes are the ones that have a clear punchline. The best books are the ones that leave you feeling some sort of closure. Even 1984, with its insanely depressing ending was clear and concise; you cared about the way it ended. Ultimately, the ending matters less than what happened leading up to that point. Nobody would care about the ending in that book if they weren't given some reason to care, some reason to want to see our protagonist win out. This is why you write the middle last; it's more important than everything else. This is the part I suck at. This is the part that leaves me writing notes and flow charts and notes within my flow charts. I create an artistic masterpiece that would have Jackson Pollock envious of my ordered chaos. It doesn't help me write though. It simply helps me feel overwhelmed and unable to move on and do something with my ideas.
I need help. If anyone's actually reading this, can you help me out? I need many beginnings and many ends. I need to practice the middle parts. I want to see point A, point B and then practice getting from one to the other. The reason I want help here is that I don't want to care about either point though. I just want to practice writing as a matter of fact, not as a matter of investigating my own ideas and niether as an exercise in clomping through my own literary comfort zones.
So, if anyone wants to provide me with some Beginning/End combos, send them to me. I'll try my best to flesh out the middle and then post them here for critique and evisceration.
Thank you in advance.
Monday 11 March 2013
Tuesday 5 March 2013
Ideally, there should be answers.
I obsess. Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I can allow myself to dive deeply into ideas that have managed to surface in my muddled mind. The process is simple.
I find something/someone new.
I ask questions.
I become intrigued by the answers.
I ask more questions.
This is the way I've been for most of my life. There are always questions that I have, and I always want to know more; I want to know everything that there is to know, then I want to know how all of this known stuff works. This usually means that - if this interest is a person - they either get extremely freaked out by me, or they start to think that I love them. If the interest expressed is in an author, an artist, a musician, then it usually means that I get to spend time collecting and absorbing things they created and increase my understanding of them. I want to understand things that excite me. I want to have their cogs, gears, springs and whirlygigs shown to me; I want to know not only what makes them tick, but why they tick, what made the ticking necessary... Ultimately, I have this need to know things.
Which brings me to my point. Writing is annoying for me. I have heard a few authors speak of themselves less as creators and more as chroniclers of stories. The characters and events already exist, they're just putting it all to paper and ensuring that the stories get told. To some, this may seem like hogwash - that the authors are just trying to make themselves seem like they have tapped into some currents of reality that we normals just can't see or feel. I feel however, that they're just great question askers. They can come up with an idea like "A guy puts a ball on a table" and flesh it out by asking a million questions. "What kind of ball? What kind of room is this table in? What made this guy choose this ball on this day in this room?" Their attention to detail could easily be called an attention to questions. I'm good at this. I can always ask these questions. Good authors though seem to be able to answer them as well. They are great askers, but fuck - those people can answer the fuck out of a question. This is where I start to lose my shit and have all attempts at writing collapse until I'm a shattered mess with a page full of ineffective horseshit with a few nuggets of decent ideas that just can't be explored enough by my incapable mind.
I'm going to work on making it more capable. I'm going to try and focus on answers for a while. Rather than simply asking questions, I'm going to try and sherlock my way into providing answers. Maybe I'll write a bit better. Either way, I suspect that I'll start to see information a bit differently.
I find something/someone new.
I ask questions.
I become intrigued by the answers.
I ask more questions.
This is the way I've been for most of my life. There are always questions that I have, and I always want to know more; I want to know everything that there is to know, then I want to know how all of this known stuff works. This usually means that - if this interest is a person - they either get extremely freaked out by me, or they start to think that I love them. If the interest expressed is in an author, an artist, a musician, then it usually means that I get to spend time collecting and absorbing things they created and increase my understanding of them. I want to understand things that excite me. I want to have their cogs, gears, springs and whirlygigs shown to me; I want to know not only what makes them tick, but why they tick, what made the ticking necessary... Ultimately, I have this need to know things.
Which brings me to my point. Writing is annoying for me. I have heard a few authors speak of themselves less as creators and more as chroniclers of stories. The characters and events already exist, they're just putting it all to paper and ensuring that the stories get told. To some, this may seem like hogwash - that the authors are just trying to make themselves seem like they have tapped into some currents of reality that we normals just can't see or feel. I feel however, that they're just great question askers. They can come up with an idea like "A guy puts a ball on a table" and flesh it out by asking a million questions. "What kind of ball? What kind of room is this table in? What made this guy choose this ball on this day in this room?" Their attention to detail could easily be called an attention to questions. I'm good at this. I can always ask these questions. Good authors though seem to be able to answer them as well. They are great askers, but fuck - those people can answer the fuck out of a question. This is where I start to lose my shit and have all attempts at writing collapse until I'm a shattered mess with a page full of ineffective horseshit with a few nuggets of decent ideas that just can't be explored enough by my incapable mind.
I'm going to work on making it more capable. I'm going to try and focus on answers for a while. Rather than simply asking questions, I'm going to try and sherlock my way into providing answers. Maybe I'll write a bit better. Either way, I suspect that I'll start to see information a bit differently.
Sunday 3 March 2013
Creative Endeavors Have to Begin Somewhere
There are few things that truly, truly motivate me to improve myself. Being the beast of a human that I am - the sad fact is that the few true motivators in my life have been fear and pleasure. A promise of either will usually sway me temporarily in one direction or another. Either full momentum, or full inertia. Few are the times where I can just do something because I want to, or because I feel like it's something that would have value in and of itself.
I used to write a lot. It was shit. It was garbage. It was absolutely, without a doubt, some of the most poorly written drivel ever put to page. There were turns of phrases that were so clever to my youth addled mind, that I sincerely thought myself to be brilliant: "He thought he saw the impossible, but realized immediately that it could not be so.". I mean, the basic idea there is ok, maybe slightly humourous. But the phrase is shit. Pure shit.
I wrote a story about something I found interesting; humans had ethereal beings attached to them that we could not observe in any way. These beings protected us in subtle ways and then, once our lives were over, they took us to the Great Beyond. Essentially, our Guardian Angels were also our Angels of Death. The idea still excites me. The things my brain thought of regarding these things. If you managed to extricate yourself from one of these things, could you then be immortal? would you be less lucky now that you had no guardian guiding you and protecting you? What if your body decayed and you were mortal, but your soul had nowhere to go, or rather no thing to take you there? I put forth the idea that nature abhorred a vacuum, so once one body stopped working, the soul would jettison itself and try to find a new host - an unborn human about to reach that point of gestation where it became human. See. My ideas were pretty good (well, I think so anyhow). The simple story had questions: when is a human a human? what makes us a human? what would happen if we had all of our experiences in memory but had to go through the process of birth, growing up and setting up a new life with new challenges? The idea of exploring this tickled my mind splendidly. When writing out the prose, though... When writing these ideas down, I found myself shitting all over my thoughts. I had no way of organizing these ideas; no way of making sure that I said what I wanted to say; no way of ensuring that the thoughts I loved so much weren't going to be twisted and sullied by prose that would make 4th graders cringe displeasure.
Back to my point.
I want to write again. Not for any real reason. I just want to write. I don't want it to be shit though. I don't want it to be the type of crap that I'd want to hide in the deepest chasms out of shame and frustration. I'm going to teach myself to write well. I'm going to take my ideas and shape them. I may write a few paragraphs here and there. I may rewrite the same things 20 times, all with slight changes, all with hopeful improvements. I may even abandon this idea for a while. But, when I do write, I will write with one goal in mind: to get in writing the thoughts that excite me.
This is for myself, but if you're reading this, you're welcome to comment and critique all you want.
-R
I used to write a lot. It was shit. It was garbage. It was absolutely, without a doubt, some of the most poorly written drivel ever put to page. There were turns of phrases that were so clever to my youth addled mind, that I sincerely thought myself to be brilliant: "He thought he saw the impossible, but realized immediately that it could not be so.". I mean, the basic idea there is ok, maybe slightly humourous. But the phrase is shit. Pure shit.
I wrote a story about something I found interesting; humans had ethereal beings attached to them that we could not observe in any way. These beings protected us in subtle ways and then, once our lives were over, they took us to the Great Beyond. Essentially, our Guardian Angels were also our Angels of Death. The idea still excites me. The things my brain thought of regarding these things. If you managed to extricate yourself from one of these things, could you then be immortal? would you be less lucky now that you had no guardian guiding you and protecting you? What if your body decayed and you were mortal, but your soul had nowhere to go, or rather no thing to take you there? I put forth the idea that nature abhorred a vacuum, so once one body stopped working, the soul would jettison itself and try to find a new host - an unborn human about to reach that point of gestation where it became human. See. My ideas were pretty good (well, I think so anyhow). The simple story had questions: when is a human a human? what makes us a human? what would happen if we had all of our experiences in memory but had to go through the process of birth, growing up and setting up a new life with new challenges? The idea of exploring this tickled my mind splendidly. When writing out the prose, though... When writing these ideas down, I found myself shitting all over my thoughts. I had no way of organizing these ideas; no way of making sure that I said what I wanted to say; no way of ensuring that the thoughts I loved so much weren't going to be twisted and sullied by prose that would make 4th graders cringe displeasure.
Back to my point.
I want to write again. Not for any real reason. I just want to write. I don't want it to be shit though. I don't want it to be the type of crap that I'd want to hide in the deepest chasms out of shame and frustration. I'm going to teach myself to write well. I'm going to take my ideas and shape them. I may write a few paragraphs here and there. I may rewrite the same things 20 times, all with slight changes, all with hopeful improvements. I may even abandon this idea for a while. But, when I do write, I will write with one goal in mind: to get in writing the thoughts that excite me.
This is for myself, but if you're reading this, you're welcome to comment and critique all you want.
-R
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