How Do You Write?

[John Arkwright]

This is for the writers out there. Here is an example of how I developed a story. I would like to know how everyone else does it. This is definitely not a BCS story, so, no, I'm not trying to polish the apple for a submission.

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Some stories are characters. Some are ideas. Some are setting. Some are events.

When I get an event story idea I have to search for characters to participate in the event. When I get a character idea I have to find something for the characters to do and a setting in which to do it.

For my last story I started with the idea of dead people voting (literally). With a horror story, I could have the living vote in an election of the dead, messing it up the way that dead people in Chicago threw the 1962 election to Kennedy. I needed characters and setting. I thought of Huey P. Long's quote, "When I die I want to be buried in Tangipahoa Parish so I can still vote."*

The setting had to be an isolated town. There could be no government to solve the town's problem with napalm or a tactical nuclear weapon. And some characters in the story had to be fanatical enough to vote on anything and to abide by what Alexis de Tocqueville called "the tyranny of the majority."

I started in Huey P. Long's depression era Louisiana in the cypress swamps of Tangipahoa (TANJ ih pah HO ah**) Parish along Lake Pontchartrain. I researched the area and found a Confederate training camp.

The U. S. Civil War would make a good setting for the story, except that Tangipahoa Parish was not organized until after the war. I could set the story in what would later become the parish.

On the other hand, a Civil War cemetery would be especially helpful in the story and there were no battles in Tangipahoa Parish. Savannah's Colonial Park Cemetary (http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/64176/bc309/4/)has Confederate tombstones that were defaced by Union soldiers. I liked that!

But Savannah surrendered to Sherman so that he would not burn it. There was not much conflict in that history and I would like a bitter past for the story.

I could lift the idea of soldiers defacing other soldiers' tombstones, but move it from Savannah back to Louisiana. Since there were no battles in Tangipahoa Parish, I decided that perhaps the battle of Mansfield in the Red River campaign was suitable. And Mansfield, in De Soto Parish was across Nachitoches Parish from Grant Parish, where the Colfax Massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colfax_Massacre) occurred.

The Colfax Massacre! That generates bitterness. Dead soldiers taken home to be buried after the Battle of Mansfield. Union troops in Reconstruction Era Louisiana sent to hunt down the White League for murdering 150-200 blacks at Colfax.

Confederate tombstones defaced in the backwoods of Grant Parish. Hate and bitterness and dead soldiers fanatically devoted to majority rule. A backwoods community caught between Union troops and the White League. That was the setting.

And I know about plenty of backwoods characters like Wiley (http://thearchoftime.blogspot.com/2008/06/wiley.html).

Bullseye!

I titled it Suffrage. I thought the slanted pun worked nicely.

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*In Louisiana, counties are called parishes.

**The natives do not pronounce the last syllable

[Boris]

Some stories I write from inspiration that comes out of the blue.

Some I write from writing prompts.

Others mutate as time goes on.

[Scott H. Andrews]

When I get an event story idea I have to search for characters to participate in the event. When I get a character idea I have to find something for the characters to do and a setting in which to do it.
I think this making sure to find those other types of elements that may not have been in the original idea is very important. I read a lot of manuscripts, and write a lot of first drafts myself, where the original idea is in there just fine, but it's not a functional story because the other ancillary things weren't added or fleshed out enough. Ideas are great, but a story also has to be built around them, with all the necessary elements, in order to turn the idea into functional fiction. IMO, at least. :)

[John Arkwright]

I think this making sure to find those other types of elements that may not have been in the original idea is very important. I read a lot of manuscripts, and write a lot of first drafts myself, where the original idea is in there just fine, but it's not a functional story because the other ancillary things weren't added or fleshed out enough. Ideas are great, but a story also has to be built around them, with all the necessary elements, in order to turn the idea into functional fiction. IMO, at least. :)

I agree. Nothing points out the fact that ideas alone will not make a story more than when an author does not develop characters. Lots of people buy Michael Crichton's books, but from my perspective he pastes cardboard characters into a perfunctory plot that started with a science idea. I find that I cannot fully evaluate the quality of Crichton's ideas, because he does not create characters that I care about.

About half of F&SF Magazine's stories do not contain characters that I care about. You linked to Charles Coleman Finlay. His story in the August issue, The Political Prisoner, was excellent. It took a few pages, but Maxim drew me in, and I cared enough about him enough to keep reading the story of his dismal trials.

Finlay's ideas were (1) the psychology of totalitarian control and (2) the struggle to terraform a lifeless, but aquaous, planet.

But characters and an idea will not make a story. A story needs conflict that the characters can grow large enough to resolve--resolve in some sense, since they may not "win." Finlay's protagonist, Maxim, "wins" by enduring. Maxim changes in the story by seeing the humanity in beings whom he had previously designed global strategies to demonize, enabling persecution approaching genocide. Maximum survives by cooperating with them.

Boris mentioned writing prompts. Sometimes those work for me, as well. I had never pictured myself writing steampunk until I saw a prompt. I love murder mysteries set in the late 1800's. I found it natural to write in the steampunk genre. The characters ended up being Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, Vincent, a novice monk with a delicate emotional state, Timur the terrorist grandson of the last Mughal emperor, and the economist, John Stuart Mill, Indian correspondent for the British East India Company. Ideas: Pleasure is harmful, a company ruling a country (a cyberpunk idea that actually existed in the 1800s), and that a non-cynical approach to the scientific viewpoint kills spirituality.

I have babbled enough. From this post, you can see that when I revise stories I always have to pare down the dialogue.

[Jim Johnson]

How do I write...hmm. For short stories, I hit upon an idea and jot it down if I don't have my Neo handy. Story ideas go on 3x5 cards that are posted onto my cork board in my home office. When it's time to write a short story, I grab a card off the board, review the story idea I had written down, think about a few angles, then pick one and bang out that story just as fast as I can.

Then I'll import the text from my Neo into Word, format it, spell check it, and print a copy for my first reader. She reads it, we discuss any sticky points, I revise it and mail it. A few days turnaround, tops, from starting to write to dropping it in the mail.

For novels, I tend to spend about a month hammering out as detailed an outline as possible, hitting every key moment, character, and issue in the book. I sweat blood over the outline. Once that outline is complete, and tells a full story from beginning to end, I'll start the novel draft and bang out the first draft, following the outline. I write that draft in a white-hot heat, hitting 3000-5000 words a day or more if I've got nothing else to distract me. When the full first draft is done, I take a short break to recover my senses, then print out two copies; one for me to read and one for my reader.

Read through the thing, jotting down any notes and making what redlines I note, then I follow something resembling Holly Lisle's one pass revision:

http://www.hollylisle.com/fm/Workshops/one-pass-revision.html

to get it done. Then query letters and so on into the mail.

Then it's off to the next book or story, and the one after that, etc.

[John Arkwright]

What an amazing pace, Jim! Was it always that way or did the process smooth out with experience?

[Jim Johnson]

What an amazing pace, Jim! Was it always that way or did the process smooth out with experience?

It definitely took years of experience to get to that point. When I first started writing, I'd write a short story and agonize over it for months, assuming I even finished it. I had a bad habit of writing several thousand words with no direction or end in sight, then going back to the beginning to edit it, and never actually finish it.

Gradually, I forced myself to first finish everything I wrote. That was the first step. Then, to spend less time on revisions and edits. Mostly because I didn't know whether the story was good or not. I'm a lousy judge of writing, either my own or someone else's.

I had it hammered in to me by many writers that it's not my job to judge the writing--that's an editor's job. All I'm responsible for is writing the best story I can and mailing it out to an editor, then writing the next one and so on.

Took a while to get that process internalized till it was standard practice. I also had Heinlein's rules hammered in to me:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

Pretty basic rules when you look at them, but man, they're hard to stick to consistently.

[Merc]

This is for the writers out there. Here is an example of how I developed a story. I would like to know how everyone else does it.
Sit down and hit the keyboard with both fists and pray something intelligible shows up? :D

Heh, okay, so I do try to put a little more thought into it than that. A lot of the time I'm ambushed by wacky ideas that hold my brain hostage until I either 1.) write the story no matter how crappy it is just to get it down, or 2.) launch a counterstrike against the ideas... often with flamethrowers and tactical nukes until I liberate my brain and then write the story after jotting down an outline and figuring out what I want to do with it. The ideas don't like that approach so much. *cough*

I do work various ways. (This post is mostly about short stories, since I demand more cooperation from my brain for novels and attempt to plan them more. Simply because it's a bigger time commitment, whereas shorts I can usually do in a few hours/days depending on length.)

Sometimes an idea or story will pop into my head more or less whole and I jot it down and figure I can fix it later if it's not total crap. Other times there's a spark of an idea and I poke with a stick and mess around with it until it resembles a blob-like mess (or something I could write and work with--either way). The later usually ends up with a rough outline and notes and a bit more planning.

Eh. I have no consistent method. ;) I write. Most of the time I even finish. If it doesn't suck too badly and doesn't induce self-inflicted eye-gouging by beta readers, I put it in my 'revision' file and work on it until I've got something that I like, and then polish and submit.

Novels are a whole 'nother thing...


Hope I'm not scaring anyone off with my weird humor and tone. :) I do take my writing seriously but firmly believe in having fun doing it.

~Merc

[John Arkwright]

I seem to do a lot more planning things out first. Here is one that is jostling around my head.

My wife does genealogy. I have never seen a horror story involving genealogy--maybe I just don't read enough.

So the wife is doing genealogy and finds that she is related to some weird person. I looked around on the web (I do that a lot before I write) and found a particular voodoo goddess who was "born" in the Haitian Revolution.

So the wife is related to this woman who became a goddess. Wife is white bread and has been giddy at her "soul sister" ancestry every since she started researching that line. Now she's over the moon. She posts the line on a website.

Then the weird character(s) show up. Are they schizophrenics? Are they harmless eccentrics? Are they psycho killers?

The husband learns the story of the good Haitian goddess and her arch-nemesis, the evil nasty goddess. Difficult job here for me--dramatize the two goddesses in such a way that the reader has serious sympathy for the good one and serious trepedation about the evil one.

Before long, hubby and wife are both worried about being killed. Wife is kidnapped. When hubby gets her back, she's either drugged up or she is possessed by her ancestor/Goddess.

The possessor is trying to accomplish something against the enemy. Except that hubby keeps worrying that she's possessed by the evil one instead, who is working against the good one. Finally, this reaches a head with hubby knowing that the wife is possessed by the evil one and having to choose between saving his wife, who may not ever "return" to him or killing her because she is bent on doing scary mojo evil to good people.

Since the idea of killing the family members who is evil is reminiscent of the Baghavad Gita, I plan to run the central lesson of the Gita through the story as the theme.

That is about a week's thinking. Now I figure out why the reader will fall in love with the wife. Figure out how the reader will know that the husband is wonderful, loving and worthwhile. Make them three dimensional. Figure out the evil guys.

But, really, before all that is done, I'll start writing and figure out some of it on the fly.

[Carl T. Abt]

Dear Mr. Arkwright,
You pay a lot of attention to details, which I suppose is fitting for historically-based fiction, and it may force you to consider new ideas. However, you may be making life harder for yourself than it needs to be. 99.9% of readers won't know if you're making up the details, so it probably wouldn't hurt the story if you bent a few minor facts where convenient. Maybe I just don't understand the motivation for writing historical fiction.

[John Arkwright]

Storyteller,

Aaaaaagh! I'm melting!

John

[Matthew Wuertz]

Here's how I write short stories: some idea will be in my mind. I let it rattle around for a couple of weeks, sometimes longer. It builds into phrases and dialog, to the point that I can hear how some of the paragraphs will read. If a character seems fuzzy (and they usually are at first), I'll spend time thinking through all the nuances of who that person is, life history, likes, dislikes, how they speak. I do several edits, starting with major changes and then working my way down to polishing word choices. I like to read the work aloud to hear how well it flows, something that I can't always tell just by reading it silently.

The story I'm currently working on came about because we have a baby, and I hadn't slept well for a number of days (I think it's starting to get better, or maybe I'm just hoping). I was getting so tired that I thought I was seeing stuffed animals move slightly. I wondered what a character in a similar state of mind would do in an alternative setting, something a bit more outlandish than a nursery.

I don't think I have enough experience writing novels to see a pattern yet. Ask me again in ten years. ;-)

-Matt

[Scott H. Andrews]

Dear Mr. Arkwright,
You pay a lot of attention to details, which I suppose is fitting for historically-based fiction....
I do think details are important in historical fiction--there are a lot of readers who know a lot of history and love to nitpick it.

That's one of the reasons I enjoy writing settings that are completely fictional--I can make up the details and no one can nitpick them because it's not a factual or historical setting.

I love George R. R. Martin's account of how he came up with the shambler, one of the exotic other-wordly pets in his award-winning story "Sandkings." He had no idea what the shambler looked like or was--he just thought the name was cool, so he used it. In completely fictional settings, I think the suggestion or vibe of detail, in things like cool names such as "the shambler," is more important than the actual details. And you don't have to remember historical facts in order to write it. :)

[Grace Seybold]

I've found that not censoring myself is key. If I come up with a plot or an idea for a scene or a character, even if I think it's highly unlikely I will ever use it, I make myself write it down. I've got several hundred of these snippets on my hard drive and whenever I need inspiration I page through them and something often leaps out at me. Usually at any given time I will have two or three stories going that I expect to actually finish, and several dozen more that I'll go back to occasionally and add a few paragraphs to, and then my idea bank that I'm constantly adding to and mining from.

I also get a large number of my initial story ideas from dreams. Probably about thirty percent. Several years ago I began writing down my dreams every morning and while most of them make no sense as plots (I've only gotten two usable plots from dreams ever), they often have images, characters or settings that I can develop.

Because of this very scattershot method of writing, I'm a pretty slow writer; I average about one finished story every three months, counting the time it takes for one or both of my beta readers to go through it and for me to do one or more edits based on their suggestions. I've tried being more focused and not letting myself write anything else while I've got a good story on the go, but whenever I do this it dries up my creativity completely. I'm sort of hoping this is something that will improve as I get more experienced, but it seems to be working for me at the moment, so I'm not too concerned about it.

[Carl T. Abt]

Grace,
Have you tried writing flash fiction? I recently started to write a short short every day, and it has really got the creative juices flowing. Flash fiction might be a good fit for you because you don't have to do much plotting. You can take the image or setting you get from a dream and turn it into a complete story. Not to say that what you are doing now is bad if it helps you build stories slowly but surely, but you might want to explore a new form of writing, one that might leverage your strengths better.

[Grace Seybold]

I've written flash fiction occasionally, but it's pretty rare that I can manage to say anything that concisely. Most of the time my initial inspirations aren't for things that will work well as stand-alones.

A story every day is incredibly impressive! Is that on top of writing longer things, or has it more or less replaced it?

[Carl T. Abt]

Don't be too impressed yet - I just started this story-a-day habit. I have four stories to show for it so far. I'm probably not going to make it today though. I started a story, got going good, and then realized it would be much better cast as a scene rather than as exposition. I'll have to convert it tomorrow since I can't stand to revise a first draft on the day I write it - it's too hot to handle. If I rewrite it and write another story tomorrow, I'll call it even.

So far, this flash fiction habit has replaced my other writing, but I'm okay with that because I feel I must master flash fiction before I can do short stories. I'm just not sure if I've mastered the basic elements of storytelling, and flash fiction provides a small and simple environment in which to practice and experiment. It's also teaching me how to say a lot with very little, or better yet, with a well-timed silence. I've tried writing many short stories, but something's just not clicking between me and them yet - maybe I don't know enough about structure on (relatively) large scales. Maybe I just don't know enough overall, and flash fiction provides quick and easy way to learn because I don't invest too much time on any one story.

[Grace Seybold]

Okay, so I tried writing a flash fiction story last week, and it took me four days of actual writing, plus two days where I didn't write because of work. Not terribly impressive for a thousand words! Plus I don't think the story makes any sense. I'm just not able to write fast, I think.

Although considering it's only about the twelfth story I've finished in the past two years, I'm still counting it as a success.

[Carl T. Abt]

Keep it up Grace! I find that how much I learn is correspondent to how many stories I have workshopped more than to their length. My plan to write a story a day has crashed and burned like all of my plans to be a prolific writer. It was only a matter of time, and some part of me knew it. Still, I think I'm writing faster now. None of the five flashes I showed my workshop buddies worked, but at least I learned why. I am learning to simplify my writing - a skill I think will prove useful in all my writing, not just flashes.

[Grace Seybold]

That makes a lot of sense (learning from variety rather than wordage). I'm not usually able to quantify what, if anything, I've learned from doing a given piece, but I'd say that in general I do get as much out of writing the short ones as the longer ones. (Not that any of the longer ones have been *that* long; I'm still several years away from being able to write a readable novel, I expect.) This latest one, mostly what I've learned from it is that apparently I put all kinds of symbolism into it that I didn't intend to; my beta reader has a background in literary criticism so he knows all about that kind of thing, so he's pointing out all this symbolic stuff that I wasn't thinking about at all. Very odd. Does that ever happen to you at your workshops? (I've never actually attended a writing workshop, though I'd like to sometime as it sounds very cool.)

[Carl T. Abt]

You should definitely get to some workshops. A beta reader is great, but it is also useful to get a wide perspective on your stories. It will also give you a chance to find out what works in other people's stories and what doesn't. It may help you write more because you'll be on deadlines.

I have the opposite problem with symbolism. I've been addicted to it. Funny thing is, I prefer reading stories without a glut of it. I'm making a resolution (fingers crossed) to focus on characters and relationships - let the symbols arise from them. I keep trying to be clever, and my characters suffer for it. I've known this for quite some time, but it doesn't do much to stop me from repeating my mistakes. There's something in me that won't let go of the need to appear brilliant.

[steffenwolf]

Grace,
along similar lines of your unintended symbolism: I wrote a story with a character named Scratch, who is conducting a very unethical business deal . Only after I got some critiques back on it that said that "Scratch is obviously intended to be the devil," and that had me scratching my head until I learned that "Old Scratch" is a nickname for the devil, and there have been more than one "deal with the devil" stories written with the devil calling himself Mr. Scratch. Not only was my character acting unethically, the story took the form of a "deal with the devil" story from the devil's perspective, and I hadn't even realized it!
That is really weird to me. I swear I've never heard that nickname, nor read those stories.

Along the lines of the original question, I get story ideas from various places. My very first writing was based on a character in a dream. Just the character, no setting. Then I wondered what setting would make a character like that, and what other characters would be necessary, etc...

Most times ideas don't just come to me, I really have to concentrate to get them started, but once they get started the ideas flow like crazy. For instance, I started one story by asking "If overdependence on cell phones continues to grow, what could the future be like", and it ended up being kind of an action/murder mystery story. Another time I set out to write a story about a doppelganger. The end result had nothing to do with doppelgangers, after it had morphed during the dullness of my daily commute.
,Dave


That makes a lot of sense (learning from variety rather than wordage). I'm not usually able to quantify what, if anything, I've learned from doing a given piece, but I'd say that in general I do get as much out of writing the short ones as the longer ones. (Not that any of the longer ones have been *that* long; I'm still several years away from being able to write a readable novel, I expect.) This latest one, mostly what I've learned from it is that apparently I put all kinds of symbolism into it that I didn't intend to; my beta reader has a background in literary criticism so he knows all about that kind of thing, so he's pointing out all this symbolic stuff that I wasn't thinking about at all. Very odd. Does that ever happen to you at your workshops? (I've never actually attended a writing workshop, though I'd like to sometime as it sounds very cool.)

[Kenneth Mark Hoover]

For myself I usually have an emotional conflict in a particular setting I want to explore and the story begins from that. I try to strike a balance between characterization and idea in all my stories. I've always felt the two have a synergistic effect which makes them stronger when paired together. More so than if they were separate and on their own.

I only work on one story at a time and am one of those who actually enjoy the research process. I also have a couple of pretty good beta-readers who often keep me from making a fool of myself. Well, they try anyway. Sometimes I get the impression they wish they were more successful! :p

[John Arkwright]

Kenneth said, "I also have a couple of pretty good beta-readers who often keep me from making a fool of myself. Well, they try anyway."

Thus far, my most discouraging problem involves a disconnect between my betas and editors. After betas give me their opinions, I interrogate them. "What did the protagonist want?" "Why did X react to the protagonist like that?" "How did the xmomogigger spell work?"

Of course, I do not always succeed. But on plenty of issues that are crystal clear to the betas, the editors are baffled. My view is that the editors have large stacks of slush to get through and a story from a nobody like me does not command their attention to the same extent as it does my betas.

Life is hard. Then you die.

John

[Scott H. Andrews]

My view is that the editors have large stacks of slush to get through and a story from a nobody like me does not command their attention to the same extent as it does my betas.
I don't think it's actually quite that stark or dire. :)

What I do think is that editors will give a story from a writer who has prior sales to solid markets a few more pages to establish itself, a little more time to hit its stride. A story from a writer they've never heard of might only get a half a page to establish itself.

Or at some markets, even less. Sean Wallace, who co-edits Fantasy magazine, had a neat blog post last week showing the percentages of "new" writers published by the major SF/F/H magazines (http://oldcharliebrown.livejournal.com/234678.html). (His criteria for "new" were that a writer be Campbell-eligible; that is, have had their first pro-rate sale within the last two years.)

Those percentages clearly show that some magazines are more accessible to "new" writers than others. I don't think the magazines with tiny percentages on that list are giving no attention to work from new writers, but I do think they are looking to be greatly impressed from the very first word. And if they aren't, they move on to the next submission.

That's the main reason I think all stories need to start with something very interesting. It can be a catchy hook line, although those often seem gratuitous to me. It can be a neat thing about the world or a neat thing neat about the protagonist, or something that shows the uniqueness of the narrative voice. Or multiple of those things at the same time. That IMO is the best way to impress editors from the very first line.

[W Knight]

I agree that newer authors have less leeway to get their point across. John Joseph Adams, former editor at F&SF, had a revealing Twitter recently, basically it said: don't spend eight pages in a nine page story, setting the scene. Early on that was one of the pitfalls I ran into. Now I use conversation between characters to further the exposition, as many of the authors that I admire do. One of my rejections from BCS said the same thing, a story was slow because much of the dialogue was internal. The story has to move to keep a swamped editor interested.
As for how I get my ideas, they come from the strangest places, and the great thing about the speculative fiction genre is that almost nothing is too far-fetched, as long as it is believable in the context of your story.

[Scott H. Andrews]

...: don't spend eight pages in a nine page story, setting the scene. Early on that was one of the pitfalls I ran into. Now I use conversation between characters to further the exposition, as many of the authors that I admire do.
I totally agree about having a story get moving as soon as possible. Especially these days, when a story has to compete for the reader's attention with PS3 games or surfing the web, etc, I think the first few pages must hook the reader immediately.

I also think interaction between characters is a great way to hold the reader's interest while showing the world and characterizing those characters. I recently watched the movie "The International" and rewatched "Ronin." The early scenes in "The International" have the protagonist, Clive Owen, on his own a lot, looking angst-ridden. I didn't get much characterization from that.

But the early scenes in "Ronin" have DeNiro interacting with Jean Réno and Sean Bean, who themselves are two very different characters (one professional and one very amateur). DeNiro's interactions with them vividly show all the important aspects of his character, in an engaging and compact way. It's also done while they're discussing the details of their mission, which provides the plot and the stakes.

Internal monologue of course is better for some situations and some characters, but I think it is intrinsically harder to make engaging, so the hook in sections of it may need to come from something else.

[Unregistered]

I think you mean Jean Réno, not Luc Besson, though Réno has appeared in many of Besson's films.

[Scott H. Andrews]

I think you mean Jean Réno, not Luc Besson, though Réno has appeared in many of Besson's films.

Oops--you're absolutely right! Thanks for catching that.

[The Crimson Avenger]

My method has a lot to do with my background. I encountered fantasy by playing Dungeons and Dragons. And unlike most Dungeon Masters, my DM generated our adventures through our chracters and their interaction with the world. The first session of the campaign was a standard small-scope quest. And undoubtedly, one of our PCs do something (steal something, kill the wrong person, insult a criminal gang) and that would generate the rest of the campaign, which we might play through for two or three years.

So, I always start with characters. I imagine who they are, who they like, who they hate and who they might have pissed off. And then the ideas really start flowing.

[cannonfodder]

At the risk of sounding pedantic, I write by simply putting one word after another. All the inspiration in the world won't do it for you unless you put that butt in that chair and hammer out that story, word after word. In my early 20's I thought it was all about the muse, all about divine inspiration. I kept waiting, and little was written. Later, I figured out that writing was more of a craft than a talent; you work at it until you become sufficiently skilled to produce constant and high quality work.

[Michael R. Fletcher]

Lately I've tried to start by sketching out stories in point form. This goes against my basic Taoist nature which just wants to let things happen. However, the Taoist technique kept leading me in to dead ends where I had no idea where the story would go or how to end it. There are at least half a dozen unfinished stories that started because I got excited about an idea and will never be finished because I now can't remember what that idea was.

So. Planning worked. Then I (partially) reverted.

The last two stories I wrote started as a scene that looked cool in my head. After writing that initial scene I came up with the back story and then thought about where it was going next. This was unintentional. It does, however, give me some of the rush I get from just blasting something onto the page and the planned-ness (seriously, it's a word) to finish said story.

How well this worked has yet to be determined. Sure the stories got finished... But will they sell? Are they any good?

F*kt if I know.

Oh yeah. The other part of writing. Make huge mug of very strong tea. Add two heaping teaspoons of instant coffee. Add two heaping teaspoons of unsweetened cocoa powder. Sweeten to taste. Twitch. Write. Repeat as needed.