Writer’s Block. Oh, what a horrible term! If you let your imagination run amok (which most writers do), it conjures up visions of a monolith blocking your path. No way around it! No way under it, over it or through it! Oh, please, somebody throw me a stick of dynamite!
I’m a member of several writer’s groups on LinkedIn, and there have been discussions on writer’s block and how to avoid or survive it. One suggestion I found helpful came from Richard Castle, the fictional author portrayed by Nathan Fillion on the TV show Castle.
“I don’t believe in writer’s block. I believe in writer’s embarrassment. That’s when you’re so embarrassed by the horrendous drivel you’re writing that you can’t bear to see it on the page. After all, you can always write something. I’ve discovered that giving yourself permission to write poorly is the gateway to writing well. It may not be good, it may not make sense, but that’s okay. After enough pages of meaningless drivel, your brain will uncover something interesting, and before you know it, you’re off and writing again.”
Good advice from a fictional writer of fiction.
I’ve written pages and pages of drivel. Chapters of crap. As I write it, I know it’s crap, and I’m thinking, “At some point I’m going to hit ‘delete’ and wipe all this out.” But I keep going because this is a writing lesson and I’m determined to learn it.
It reminds me of the story of the twin boys, one a pessimist and the other an optimist. One Christmas the pessimist received every toy imaginable, yet he was deeply depressed. When asked why, he replied, “I know every one of these toys will break eventually.” His brother’s gift was a pile of manure, and his parents found him delightedly flinging it in all directions because “there’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere!”
Yes, I’m embarrassed by the drivel—but not for long. At some point I’ll find that pony.
Showing posts with label writing fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing fiction. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
THE EVOLUTION OF SWAGGER VASA
The adventures of writing a science fiction series.
The character of Swagger Vasa began life in Star Wars fan fiction. Co-author, JJ, was downsized in 2008. While filling out applications and going on interviews, she found “sanity maintenance” in writing Star Wars fan fiction on fanfiction.net.
For those unfamiliar with the genre, fan fiction is when people write stories about their favorite characters from TV or film (or sometimes video games) and share them with other fans. JJ wrote Star Wars fiction and had several original characters, one of whom was named Swagger. As she wrote, she gained a good-sized following, and reviewers urged her to take her original characters mainstream. When I encouraged her, she said, “Only if you’ll collaborate; I think this is too big for just one person.”
So in April 2009 I took a couple days off work to see if I could get back into writing—which I’d put on hold for quite a while. I read what JJ had written and was impressed. I agreed to help as my schedule allowed—after all, I was working full-time, editing a quarterly e-newsletter, doing tarot readings at a local New Age shop, among other things. Little did I know that the Monday I went back to work I’d be downsized.
At first I put 90% of my time and 99% of my energy into looking for another job, which was becoming a gloomy prospect. A few days after being downsized I woke about 3:30 a.m., terrified. Awful thoughts wound through my brain: “What if I don’t find a job?” “How will I live?” That kind of thing. And then a calm little voice said, “You have two choices. You can lay here and be terrified, or you can get up and do something with this emotion.”
So I got out of bed, closed my door, turned on my computer, and wrote a chapter. And thus the collaboration began.
We took turns writing, taking time out to talk about where the story was going and what characters we needed. We did research on technology, scouring the internet for information. I was downsized on April 20, and by June 20 we had finished the first draft of A Sirius Condition and were talking about a sequel. We told friends what we were doing, and they said, “Oh no! This isn’t going to be just two books. You’ve got at least a trilogy on your hands.”
Okay, three books. We can do it. We decided to finish all three before doing the final edits on book one and setting out to publish. That’s one rule I learned (the hard way) doing the e-newsletter. Somebody wants to write a series, but after the first article disappears and you never get the rest of the articles. And you know how it is writing fiction—a bad guy in book one turns out to be a good guy by book three, or you make monumental changes and decide to take out several characters that aren’t working. Plots can take interesting twists, necessitating major changes.
So we dug in and really worked. By December 24, 2010, twenty months after starting, we finished the first draft of book three. Not bad, eh? And we started the New Year editing A Sirius Condition.
Swagger was put on hold when JJ had a life-threatening medical issue early in 2011. When she was feeling better, we got busy again, and in early December 2011 published Swagger Vasa Chronicles – Book One – A Sirius Condition on amazon.com. Our author page is http://www.amazon.com/Karen-Howard/e/B0034ODDV2.
I’m now editing book two, A Sirius Misunderstanding, while JJ makes major revisions to book three, Sirius Repercussions. And, yes, we’ve started on book four, Siriusly Twisted. The other day we came up with a possible title for book five… So our friends were right—this is going to be a series.
A lot of us had our jobs go away. The lesson is that we can sit and feel sorry for ourselves, or we can take that drive, that emotion, that terror of losing everything, and do something with it. What’s your choice?
The character of Swagger Vasa began life in Star Wars fan fiction. Co-author, JJ, was downsized in 2008. While filling out applications and going on interviews, she found “sanity maintenance” in writing Star Wars fan fiction on fanfiction.net.
For those unfamiliar with the genre, fan fiction is when people write stories about their favorite characters from TV or film (or sometimes video games) and share them with other fans. JJ wrote Star Wars fiction and had several original characters, one of whom was named Swagger. As she wrote, she gained a good-sized following, and reviewers urged her to take her original characters mainstream. When I encouraged her, she said, “Only if you’ll collaborate; I think this is too big for just one person.”
So in April 2009 I took a couple days off work to see if I could get back into writing—which I’d put on hold for quite a while. I read what JJ had written and was impressed. I agreed to help as my schedule allowed—after all, I was working full-time, editing a quarterly e-newsletter, doing tarot readings at a local New Age shop, among other things. Little did I know that the Monday I went back to work I’d be downsized.
At first I put 90% of my time and 99% of my energy into looking for another job, which was becoming a gloomy prospect. A few days after being downsized I woke about 3:30 a.m., terrified. Awful thoughts wound through my brain: “What if I don’t find a job?” “How will I live?” That kind of thing. And then a calm little voice said, “You have two choices. You can lay here and be terrified, or you can get up and do something with this emotion.”
So I got out of bed, closed my door, turned on my computer, and wrote a chapter. And thus the collaboration began.
We took turns writing, taking time out to talk about where the story was going and what characters we needed. We did research on technology, scouring the internet for information. I was downsized on April 20, and by June 20 we had finished the first draft of A Sirius Condition and were talking about a sequel. We told friends what we were doing, and they said, “Oh no! This isn’t going to be just two books. You’ve got at least a trilogy on your hands.”
Okay, three books. We can do it. We decided to finish all three before doing the final edits on book one and setting out to publish. That’s one rule I learned (the hard way) doing the e-newsletter. Somebody wants to write a series, but after the first article disappears and you never get the rest of the articles. And you know how it is writing fiction—a bad guy in book one turns out to be a good guy by book three, or you make monumental changes and decide to take out several characters that aren’t working. Plots can take interesting twists, necessitating major changes.
So we dug in and really worked. By December 24, 2010, twenty months after starting, we finished the first draft of book three. Not bad, eh? And we started the New Year editing A Sirius Condition.
Swagger was put on hold when JJ had a life-threatening medical issue early in 2011. When she was feeling better, we got busy again, and in early December 2011 published Swagger Vasa Chronicles – Book One – A Sirius Condition on amazon.com. Our author page is http://www.amazon.com/Karen-Howard/e/B0034ODDV2.
I’m now editing book two, A Sirius Misunderstanding, while JJ makes major revisions to book three, Sirius Repercussions. And, yes, we’ve started on book four, Siriusly Twisted. The other day we came up with a possible title for book five… So our friends were right—this is going to be a series.
A lot of us had our jobs go away. The lesson is that we can sit and feel sorry for ourselves, or we can take that drive, that emotion, that terror of losing everything, and do something with it. What’s your choice?
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