A writer's look at the writing industry and the Internet.

Another year past,
another solar orbit.
Time flies, doesn’t it?

My birthday sure came around quickly this year. It seems only a week or two ago that I was digging my driveway out of the snow so that I could head off to Christmas Day festivities, a month or so before that it was Easter, and then a few weeks prior to that it was my previous birthday. Tempus does indeed fugit…

In your pre-teens time takes an eternity, often measured by the arrivals of birthdays, summer holidays, Easter and Christmas. Then you hit your teens and things are then measured (at least where I grew up) by notable birthdays — 13 (teenager!), 15/16 (age of consent), 17 (driving licence) and 18 (drinking age). Aside from the round numbers of 20 and 25, and the more traditional and now meaningless “coming of age” 21st birthday, in your twenties you notice that these events start to speed up. I’m now officially in my “late thirties” and they’re getting even faster. But there’s hope once you get into your forties, fifties and beyond. No, wait… I got that wrong. There isn’t. It just gets faster still, so I’m told.

But it’s not all bad. Growing old is a privilege that most of humanity doesn’t get — even in this day and age. I also like to reflect that those who have achieved mighty things had exactly the same hours in each of their days as I have in mine. If anything, we have more leisure time available than any of the generations who have gone before us. Most of us get Saturday off for a start, saying nothing of not having to forage for food or shelter, and living twice as long with better quality lives than people even a century ago. And while it’s a far cry from the futuristic computer utopia we were promised in the 1970s — that computers would reduce our working days to 4 hours or less with the same productivity and pay — the reality is that we’re required to get more done in the same amount of time simply because we can.

The plus side to this is that we can achieve more in each of those days than ever before — the trick is to make what you’re doing meaningful, if and where you can. And that’s exactly why I’m writing and working on building a career as a writer.

While exactly how I achieve that is still slightly nebulous (to use classic British understatement), I am working on creating a short story each week and submitting it to publishers, building my technical skills as a writer (not that you’d see it in this long and winding, self-indulgent ramble of a post), testing out how social networking can complement my activities, building a network of contacts and going to conferences. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating journey that I’ve just begun, and I’m enjoying all of it.

I received an excellent birthday present from the Open University last night: the results of the writing course I’ve recently completed. It’s a result with which I’m extremely pleased, and the tutor’s marking and personal comments are extremely encouraging. The tutor is also encouraging me to turn the piece I wrote for the assessment into a full book, so I suppose that’s high praise? She’s also encouraging me to take the next level creative writing course, which is the natural progression of this creative writing stream. It’s a year-long course costing over £600 and will require 600 hours of study (around 19 hours per week), so it’s not something I’m going to do without serious consideration. But I am serious considering it, and have until late Summer to decide.

Among the many the things I’m striving to achieve in my writing career, I am currently trying to get my head around the concept of pre-planned writing. As a lifelong pantser, an instinctive technique that has served me well in all my short story writing, this is coming as something of a shock!

To aid with this, I’m making use of Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method, which essentially sees you start at the logline of a book (the one-sentence summary of what it’s about that also doubles as your “elevator pitch” when you try to sell it) and then gradually expand into paragraphs, pages, character sheets, etc, until you’ve done all your plotting, design and preparation and only then do you begin writing the first draft. As someone with a technical background, this makes a great deal of sense intellectually: you wouldn’t build a house without architectural plans, and I do outline my technical writing. Just not the fiction.

This method is at least notionally similar to the concept of mind mapping,* where you write a single word or concept in the centre of a page, draw annotated lines out from it representing major points, draw annotated lines out from them, and so on and so forth. Which in turn is similar to the idea of lists of lists, as found in productivity systems such as Getting Things Done. Essentially an hierarchical (or structure chart) representation with few high-level bits at the top and increasing numbers of lower-level bits as you go down. Very logical to anyone who’s studied Computer Science!

However, all my fiction to date has been achieved by pantsing, and I suspect it goes back to the creative writing lessons we did in English classes at school. They always gave us a writing prompt consisting of part of the opening sentence and told us to go nuts:

Forcing open the door of his mangled car, John staggered away just as…

Now tell me you couldn’t write ten pages from that prompt? I could, always have done and fast. I love it. This is what “writing fiction” has always been for me. But I don’t want to have my writing career defined as “great flash fiction writer — shame he never wrote a novel.” What’s worse, many prompts and ideas come to me in the same way. It’s rare that I remember my dreams, but when I do they either stick or I write them down in a notepad I keep beside my bed, or in the 14x9cm Moleskine I carry with me everywhere (it doubles as my To Do list, so it’s not all about writerly appearances).

The most recent dream-generated prompt I remember is simply, ‘You’re dying…’ From that I’ve somehow decided that this is the start of a science fiction mercenary story (I’m thinking Babylon 5 meets The Jackal), and I’m 5,000 words in and on the second scene. From here I could take this story in a thousand directions and could just continue writing it ad nauseum, but without structure, logic or a compass. In its own perverted way, this has led to indecision that has resulted in a kind of writers’ block: I have plenty of ideas but, because I don’t know where to go from here, I’m stuck!

This is where I’ve realised that this story has the potential to become a novel and I want to do it properly. Hence the Snowflake Method. Although I’m currently in the process of studying my first creative writing short course with the Open University, I don’t want to sit still. There is no rush, but I know the danger of allowing yourself to feel as though you’re never ready or that the timing is never right. I’ll finish this course first, then I’ll just do that course before I start. Besides, if this course does show me a better way to do this, I can always start again.

Right now I’m at Step 3 of the Snowflake Method — building the character summaries with name, one-sentence summary, motivation, goal, conflict, epiphany, and a one-paragraph summary based on all that — and I’m already beginning to see a way out of the pit of indecision. It may simply be the enthusiasm for a new methodology, but it seems that the characters are starting to take on their own lives and motivations, which in turn determines how they’ll react to given situations, and how those situations will resolve.

It’s too early to tell, but I have a sneaking suspicion that by doing all this preparation and design, you effectively end up with the writers’ equivalent of Choose Your Own Adventure: the characters will react in specific ways to any given circumstance (the rowdy guy will always choose the fight option, etc), and it effectively writes itself. I can’t wait to find out…

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* If you want to give mind mapping a try, I’m a fan of the free multi-platform software, FreeMind. I don’t buy into the “tap into the unused 99% of your brain” pseudoscience that you sometimes see surrounding the technique, but it does seem to be an effective way of gathering and recording thoughts.