Thursday Thoughts: Back on Track

 

Hello Blog-babes,

Today is a little blog about the state of my novel and a problem that I doubt is unique to me.

I’ve actually been struggling to write recently. My struggle hasn’t been in terms of putting words on metaphorical paper, it has been in an acceptance that the words are the right ones. Or even good ones.

For two weeks I have been writing small sections of prose. Where I had once managed to average about 5,000 words a day I was suddenly having to drag myself to reach 1,000. Each day I would read back over the previous day’s efforts and rip it out and try it again. It was torturous, slow and demoralising. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was writing, but I was falling into that trap of writing without saying anything. Actions would come and go with ne’er a purpose between them. It’s frustrating reading your own work and realising that you are not reaching the potential you know is there.

Aside from the story/character exercises I’ve previously blogged about – which did help! – one other invaluable tool to the writer is: discussion. If something is knotted up and you know that no matter how you try you can’t work around it… talk to someone. We have an amazing capacity, when we really need to, of making ourselves understood to other people. By trying to explain the beats and narrative of what you are trying to write to someone else, if they are not understanding it you will find yourself instinctively rephrasing your point for clarity, this continues until the other person understands. You are refining and streamlining your problem to its clearest form so that it makes sense to another, and importantly also to yourself. If you’ve got a good friend who is willing to be talked at, sit them down with a nice cup of tea and have at it.

I did this last week, set out what Evin is going through, what actions I’m writing and thematically what the section is about. And lo, I set about writing again and the words are flowing clearly and the action is moving purposefully forward.

Let your inner editor come out for a while when you both need space to breath, it will help.

I’ve also been exploring options for presenting the short stories I publish on this blog in a form that allows for them to be read on e-book/smart phone/tablet devices as an alternative to you only being able to read them on the blog itself. I had a play with Apple’s iAuthor, but I’m not sure if it’s the tool for me. I’m not sure if I’ll get anything finished before the next story is published, but hopefully soon after. And there’s one other thing that I have planned. But more on that at a later date.

– Andrew

(Also, Blog-babes?! Oh dear, that won’t do. I gotta think up a good collective term for you fine folks)

 

Thursday Thoughts: Writing Goat’s Story

Hello,

First up I feel the need to apologise for the terrible quality of the images in this post, since installing Mavericks my scanner no longer works, and no amount of searching has yet found a suitable (read: free) work around for this, so the images are taken with my phone. Yeesh.

I wanted to use this post to talk about the short story that I published on Tuesday and how it came about. I also spoke briefly on Monday about a writing exercise that I find helpful.

In the image above you can see a breakdown of the story. I will talk you round how I map out and plan the story.

Starting with the left hand bubble in the centre we have the Title of the story. This can be temporary, but it does help to start by naming your story.

Directly above that is the Subject of the story. This isn’t a detail of the plot, but a quick summation of the story. This is helpful if you feel you have a block in your writing, remind yourself what you are writing about, is what you are trying to write in service of that? Mine is simply: Goat eats pages after writing them.

The next bubble anti-clockwise is the Setting. Where and when is it set? I’d originally planned for the book to all take place from Mr. Goat’s house, but eventually moved the final scene to be elsewhere. Yours could be in the future, the past, on an alien planet…

Next left is What Changes. My story is about a goat who eats his writing when he finishes it, so the change I wanted was that he meets someone who can help him fulfil his wish to write. Your character is destined to be a different person when the story concludes, whether for the better or worse. What is it that happens to them?

At the bottom is Plot. This you must breakdown into three parts: 1. Inciting Incident – what happens that sets our story in motion? For my story, Mr. Goat eats his work and this makes him sad. 2. Complicit – How do they react to this and what actions do they take? Their involvement allows for the rest of the story to unfold. If Mr. Goat chose to carry on eating his work, it wouldn’t make for a story. He chooses to abandon his writing, breaks his routines and sets in motion the involvement of Nanny Goat. 3. Climax – I’ve spoken about endings before, here it is again, how will the story end? I wrote “Tells someone his story. They surprise him by writing it.”

Connected to the Title is the Major Theme that in the instance of Goat’s Story was of not trying something for a fear of failure. In this case as a metaphor for love, which you can see above as a Minor Theme. You can have as many minor themes as you need. Again they are good to come back to if you’re struggling to write, remind yourself what it’s about.

There’s the story mapped out in a very loose terms. There’s no right or wrong way to write this out, perhaps the themes will help dictate the plot, perhaps the plot is what comes first and you explore the themes as texture. It’s a good tool to be able to look at your story at a glance.

A similar exercise to this is regards to character. Start with your main character in the middle and all the bubbles coming out are what he/she Wants. I didn’t do this for Goat’s Story as it was a fairly straight forward piece, but for the book I have a page all about Evin with numerous bubbles coming out which lead to sub-bubbles. You can carry this further by starting a new page with your protagonist in the middle and the first bubbles around are all the secondary characters, from them you state what they want. I’ve got another page like this with Evin’s family, friends, people she’ll meet and the antagonist. You are really looking to explore what makes those characters. There will always be pieces that come out of it that you hadn’t expected, and you will see opportunities to create scenes where those characters either get or are denied the thing that they want.

If you are writing right now and having some trouble with a character and what to do next try one of the character exercises and see what comes from it.

From that basic diagram of the story I tend to move to a more detailed outline of what I want to write. For me it’s usually the major beats of the story in fairly broad strokes and I am constantly writing questions, be it whether the character would or should do something, to giving myself a couple of options for a scene. Below is the two pages for Goat’s Story.

It was at this point (despite the note on the diagram page) that the story organically became in the style of a children’s story. It seemed a logically extension for a metaphorical story as the best children’s stories are metaphors.

I’m never a slave to this outline, but I find that it helps keep me on track. In the novel I have given an entire story that I had planned for Evin to another character, which has slightly derailed the outline, but that story is better where it is now.

I hope you’ve found this interesting. I will post the story breakdowns for each short story after publication, although the posts will not contain as much explanation of the process as this. I was fortunate that the story came quite easily to me on this one, I’m sure there will be a story that won’t be so fortunate.

And next week I will reveal the details of my novel!

– Andrew

 

Monday Musings: Inspiration

Hello,

Here’s a delightfully intangible thing: Inspiration.

What is it? Where does it come from? How can we harness it? How can we generate it?

I had planned to write a very sweeping statement about what my inspiration is, and I was thinking through my previous writing to confirm the statement. However, as I thought back I realised that this wasn’t the case at all. I feel a little like I’ve been lying to people. I had to think more, where DID my inspiration come from? I had planned to say that ideas come to me in a very visual way, often a single striking image that over time becomes a story. Even though this isn’t true in every case, it is where I will start.

It is common that I will get an image of something and work my way backward from there. One such image was of a yellow and red sunset sky, silhouetted against which was a flock of birds that transformed into a formation of military aircraft across the image. For the longest time I didn’t know what that story was, but I was interested in the imagery of it. In time it became a story about a lone survivor of a battle, wounded and going delirious who befriends a young French girl who is playing the in woods. They were not able to communicate with each other but after all the fighting the soldier has witness she was a vision of an innocent future yet possible.

Sometimes I get a particular phrase stuck in my head. My novel stemmed from the phrase “They’re here” and worked forward from there originally as a very straight horror, but it changed over time to be less about who they were and more about how it all effected the central character, Evin. After a considerable period of rumination and false starts I realised that it was a story about Evin asking herself the question we all face at some point in our life: “Who am I?”

Other times ideas grow out of a sense of wanting to look at something from a different angle. I have spoken often (outside this blog) about my apathy toward the Zombie genre. I can count on one hand the works about Zombies that actually interest me, and they tend to be the ones that actually have very little to do with Zombies (TellTale Games video game of The Walking Dead was not only not about Zombies, it was also one of the best pieces of written entertainment in 2012). As I sat listlessly watching another retread of Zombie tropes I wondered how a Zombie would feel about the representation of Zombies in the media. I thought of him being offended by it. This idea grew to be a short film I made a couple of years ago called Dates of the Undead:

I’m the first to admit that translating those kernels of inspiration into salty idea-popcorn goodness is not something I’m very quick at. Those ideas tend to stick in my head and ruminate for a long time before I feel ready to put them on paper. I have got better and have picked up some good writing exercises over the years that have helped. There’s a great one for laying out structure/story/themes/characters that I used recently to start the book and last week for the short story. I thought it might be interesting to share the process of writing the short story, so after it has been published tomorrow I will talk about the process of taking the idea from suggestion to story and I will post this on Thursday.

I think my two favourite writing exercises are to write a monologue for a character stating who they are and what it is they want, and how they are going to achieve it. This will work for all your characters, you will find that with each character you will instinctively give them voices, and their desires and how they intend to achieve them will reveal a lot about who they are. It also means, at least to me, that when I start writing that I already know them, yes they will still surprise in the writing process, but the starting off point is less daunting.

A similar piece to this is to write a dialogue between two characters, if they are the protagonist and the antagonist it will help. Think of yourself as a counsellor for the characters. Let the protagonist state what they want and the antagonist state how they can’t have it. Again, it will be revealing and help find who the characters are. Give them weaknesses that will hinder their ability to get what they want. Not necessarily physical weaknesses, it could be impatience or a short temper.

Finally, where can you find inspiration? I did a writing course a few years ago and was told to choose a story from a newspaper, and write a scene based upon it. I’d found a small story about a couple on holiday who had been tied up and robbed. It was a horrible story and I don’t know why I picked it. Every part of the article made me sick and angry, the couple were threatened with assault and at times separated from each other. I wrote two pages of just utter rubbish, it was full of cliché and didn’t go anywhere or mean anything. It was a struggle to write and I only finished it the night before the next class. Out of those two pages, of all those words, the only thing that sparked any interest in me was five words: “Why do you love her?”

I became desperately intrigued by this. Why would someone take people hostage and demand an explanation of love? What would the answer be? If the people were physically separated from each other would their answers be the same? What if they weren’t the same? What if they didn’t know that? The story became about lies and truth. Lies we tell ourselves, truths we hide, accepting or rejection those ideals. It was a cat and mouse of what do people say and what do they mean.

Out of that article of misery, of two pages of horrible writing, came five words that inspired something much bigger and better.

I guess the point is that inspiration comes from anywhere, the trick is to be able to recognise it and harness it. To take whatever it is and work at it, use any tool available to you to create something from it. Sometimes that it won’t work, sometimes it’s not meant to work. But sometimes something better will come from that failure.

– Andrew