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Something strange is happening to me writing Allison Zero. It’s not that this has never happened, it’s the intensity with which it’s happening. I spend quite a while working on each part of the story, and generally edit as I go; often reading back over pages after I’ve written maybe half a page extra. And I do this multiple times to maintain the flow of what I’m writing. This is how I’ve always written.
The difference now is when I’m reading back over sections I’ll have so many ideas about what I might want to include next, or in a future part, questions I want to ask with the story, or answer, depths to a character I want to bring in, changes to my immediate plans, little details to add, even contemplating the theme and philosophy of that part, or even the entire story, that it’s taking me a lot longer than it should, at least based on past experience—purely from thinking about the story—to actually write the story. I’ve had times where I’m staring off into space, so deep in focused thought, that my monitors’ energy saving plan kicks in and they go to sleep. It’s only then I realise how long I’ve been thinking.
I’ve always been like this, it’s what works for me, but never to such an intense degree. With some stories I’d have an idea of where I want to go but no specific plan, I’d write and the details would come to me with a little bit of focus. Some stories I’d have more ideas, but there’d be an end to them; something would coalesce in my mind quite firmly and I ‘knew.’ Toni With An i was a step up in the intensity of ‘thoughts,’ and it’s mind-blowing how often it’s happening with Allison Zero. Sometimes I’ll read a paragraph and find myself thinking about it for a few minutes, then I’ll read it again, and think about it again, and more times after that. I have never been like this with writing before.
What I’m putting it down to is both Toni With An i and Allison Zero are far more ‘created’ worlds, and characters, than anything I’ve written in a long time. Almost all my fiction is fiction that drew heavily on things that happened to me, people I knew, media I’d read, or seen, or heard, conversations I’ve had with people, or overheard, news articles, scientific articles, etc. when combined with the general outline of the story I wanted to tell. With Toni, and especially Allison Zero, it’s the first time in years I’ve let myself be truly free with everything as long as it makes sense to me. That must be it, right? I’ve given myself far more creative wriggle room than before, especially in the characters, world and plotting parts, and now I’m just going wild with it?
None of this is a bad thing, just a bit different for me. Its a little annoying when I want to just write but it's also quite energising. Is this how writing is for others? Even some of the time?
Comments
You are in the 'zone'
What I'd do is add a marker to your existing text and write a note about your idea for changes in a separate document.Use the same marker.
Then, leave it for at least a day (the longer the better) and re-read your text. Go at least a 100 words beyond the marker before looking at the idea. If it fits add mark it to add. Carry on until you get to the end. Then go back and see what impact ALL the changes might have to the text and importantly, the flow of the piece.
Sometimes the idea for a change might be better used at a later point in the story. By recording the idea you have something to go back an reference.
Finally, as the end of the part/story review all those proposed changes along with re-reading the text. If the change can improve it, add it.
Only add an idea if if improves the overall story.
Just a few thoughts.
Samantha
Thanks for that
Thanks for that. That's a nice way to incorporate changes, and I'll think of it when I next write a novel to completion before publishing. It's almost like a version control. But I must have been unclear. All the thoughts, or 95%, are for what's coming later in the story. For parts that haven't been written so far. I don't think I've made any changes to existing, written text bigger than making a description clearer, correcting an error, improving the clarity of a sentence or paragraph, or changing dialogue tags to better show who's speaking since the beginning of Alison Zero. The biggest change I made in the part I'm writing now, in a part I had written, was adding the colour "red" to describe something that I'd already written sitting next to something I described as green.
I don't start writing a story with more than, typically, a rough idea of a few characters, an end point I want to hit, and some major plot/story-beats. The rest usually comes to me as I write, and it usually comes quite clearly and definitively. Sometimes taking a bit of effort.
I'm saying, now, the ideas of what will come, sometimes serious developments, are arriving thick and fast. There's a lot of them. And I'm often thinking of their implications, consequences and place in the world I'm writing over and over in my mind. I could spend up to thirty minutes considering one paragraph and all the ideas that come to me from it, and that I tease out. There's enough in my head that I have tentative plans for at least another two books.
I'm just curious if this is the experience of people who typically "create" almost everything in their world? (As opposed to writing about "real world" situations where the possibilities are grounded in a common understanding and expectations most people would have of the world.) One of my first books was a sort-of fantasy, and I don't remember it being like this, but what's happening now could be the result of quite a few years of experience, reading and writing. It's different experience and quite exciting, and freeing, and my big regret is that I often get so tired I have to stop writing I'm so tired.
Even when writing about real world
situations we create a 'universe' for our characters. We set the piece in a location, a time of year. We give our characters a history, a job and a home. We give them likes and dislikes. That is to me, a universe. What this one differs from say the Whately universe is that we don't share it with others.
I'm like you in that I start a story with an idea, a character and let it flow. Sometimes, it leads nowhere. My bulging WIP/old folder on my computer is testament to that. Don't worry about that. Sometimes a character from an abandoned story can be dug out of their virtual grave and used in a different story.
Samantha
Welcome to the world of improving your craft.
I think as we mature as authors our thinking and as a result the stories become more complex. I spent decades cranking out fluff pieces based as you say on things that happened to me and characters on people I know/knew in real life situations. One of these stories I cranked out in a single sitting. (I Should Have Seen It Coming)
A female coworker related a story about dressing up her younger brother and a story idea clicked. I went home and cranked out the story in about two hours another hour editing it and I was done. A down and dirty tale.
However, as a I began posting here on BCTS I found myself among many talented writers who could weave a tale with complex subplots and extraordinary character development. Some of my early work seems out of place posted on the same site as their work. Reading what they've written and trying to incorporated a bit of that same nuance in my work caused me to grow and develop as a writer.
I experience the kind of thing you speak of. We write in much the same creative bubble. For me, a trope, a set up if you will, is the spark that sets the creative process going and to make it progress, I need to know the end point I want to reach. As I start to write, I create a protagonist and a couple of supporting characters and fix a back story for each of them in my mind. After that, I climb into the mind of the protagonist who also acts as narrator and let him/her tell what happened from the set up to the ending.
Some authors talk about "the characters" taking over the story. That's exactly what happens in my stories. Often times I'm as much in the dark about what's happening next while I write as my readers are as they read.
As you say, I often reach a point where I feel the need to go back and make sure I'm still keeping that story flowing and I get bogged down in considering the possibilities. Often, it's overwhelming. At that point, I usually end up pushing the story into my subconscious and go do something else, like read some other author's amazing work.
Then after a time, I come back to the story, read it from the beginning and let the juices flow. My subconscious has the details worked out, but doesn't reveal them until they flow out of my fingertips onto the keyboard and on into the story.
Using this technique stretches out the time it takes to write a story, but generally it results in a more in depth story line that's more interesting to read. Most of the time it takes something a little less than 20K words for me to tell a tale. But that's not always the case.
In "If It Was Your Husband" the characters really did totally take over the story and there was as much or more going on off camera, so to speak, as there was on. Only bits and pieces were revealed to the reader and usually as hear-say narrative by one of the characters.
In that story, I reached my supposed end point and realized there was another story to be told and my muse wouldn't let me bring the story to a close. 42K words later I could put the story to rest.
It was pointed out to me that the story was "forced fem." I didn't see it as I wrote it, but in retrospect, I had to acknowledge the fact it was. What was disconcerting is that I never intended it to be that way. And I don't think that my main character, the narrator, actually felt forced, though he did feel uncomfortable many times as the story progressed and that gave the story a force fem aspect that I never intended.
The whole thing was a departure from my fluff style that I produced earlier. As a result, I've grown and changed as an author and my work has more depth and touches readers more.
I'm not sure how I feel about that because some readers, in their comments, have told me they are disturbed by what they read. That bothers me, but they also say that the fact that they are disturbed is a testament to my skill as a writer. That's a conundrum; do I want to risk disturbing reader and exercise that skill or do I want to pull back on the reins and not give my muse her head?
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
I love this Patricia
I love this post, Patricia, thank you so much for it.
I don't think I've written 'fluff' in a long time. And for a long time I was very focused on not writing fluff. I went heavily into 'serious art' to the point that I think one of my works, not widely read, but available and seen by a few experts in the area it addresses have changed some of their thoughts on the field it's in. Changed their thoughts about me, certainly, possibly even about the scope there is in the wider area I addressed in the novel. I don't know this for sure, but looking at the subtext of what they say and some of the analytics for the novel it's a case of joining two very close dots. Some of the responses I had from agents while I was pitching it to agents would indicate similar things.
If anything, the closest I've come to writing fluff is on here. Toni With An i is pure fluff, not that the writing is bad, I think it's quite good, more that it's fluff in the sense of it featuring happy people who live happy, accepting lives. It's not 'serious' in that it directly explores the soul of humanity, although it definitely points towards it if you pay close attention. I think all my work does that.
Writing what I'm writing now, though, and the effect it's had on my creative process for the moment, is purely about the freedom I've given myself. I am not addressing anything, it's entirely my own creation. The first step in not writing fluff is to look at and examine something that needs examining. To make it worthwhile to society in the sense it 'provides.' I don't think Allison Zero is focused on any one issue in modern society; its value is in contrasting—at least in the good reader's mind—Allison Zero's society with our own.
I have no issue with fluff, or trash, or jolly, happy stories. That provides people with things they need, enjoyment and comfort. Including me. It allows us to fall asleep happily and with peace. That's an incredibly valuable thing. Whether it provides the almost institution or movement of people that is 'society' with something society needs is a different matter. Both forms of writing are valuable.
And your point about somehow writing a 'forced femme' story, or how people took it that way when you didn't intend it is something I dealt with with Allison Zero - Part 4. Allison meets Robert, a foot freak (after a not very nice encounter with a different foot freak) and they have fun. I wrote it as a pleasant part of the story. Her first meeting with a man who's interested in her as a woman. Reading it back a while later I realised the social, sexual and gender politics of their encounter was similar to our own, but in many ways not. To the characters it was normal, to us, to our society? Maybe not. It was reaching a level of uncanniness in its similar-but-different ways. Was that my explicit intention? No. Is it valuable to understand it could be taken that way? Absolutely.
And I will say, reading a lot of your blog posts, Patricia, you're one of the few people who I'd consider writing a story with a reader in mind, you personally.
You said in a blog I made after the first part of Toni that you don't like reading stories with swearing and explicit sex. I don't have an issue with any reader drawing lines. I write swearing because the people I know swear. I write explicit sex, sometimes at least, because I feel it's a part of humanity. I rarely write the entire encounter, I write as much as is necessary for what I want to say. I also include drinking and sometimes drugs (although the drugs in Allison Zero are nothing like the drugs we have in modern society. They're much more akin to some of the sacred rituals many old and indigenous peoples and tribes continue to use around the world. There's a respect for them. And they're in the hands of people who understand that very quickly.)
All in all I really value your insight and willingness to seriously engage with the thoughts people have. Especially in your blog posts and responses. I think you're the first person I've ever considered explicitly writing a story for. Not that I have any idea what it would or could be. Or even if I could manage it. So thank you for contributing all you do. You are a very special person on this site (a site of many very impressive people.)
Ms Woolly
If and when
If you get around to writing a story "just for me" give me a heads up. I really would like to see just what you come up with.
I know my taste in reading has changed over time. There was a time when I liked "bad boy; good girl" sort of stories but that kind of stories often results in some really heavy duty forced fem. These days I gravitate toward stories of some guy having reason to step out of his comfort zone for the benefit of a third party. Things like dressing for a day because "mom always wanted a daughter," or so and so's daughter died and they look a great deal like the girl so they dress as the daughter to allow that person to relive some particular loving memory, etc.
I also tend to like cross-dressers being give the opportunity to come out even if just for a day.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
That does sound familiar
What you're describing is actually a little bit of a problem for me.
I have ADHD, which means I bounce between periods of broad thinking seeing a gazillion possibilities and periods of hyper-focus on a particular task. Both are useful for writing, but obviously at different points.
The first kind of thinking is great for brainstorming mode. But the danger is that when I'm trying to concentrate, those ideas will sometimes keep popping up unbidden, which can be very distracting. So I've learned to write everything down. Don't just think about it, capture it. Every crazy idea, find a place for it in the notes. Character notes. Worldbuilding ideas. A funny bit of dialogue. Possible connections. (My notes files for stories can be quite involved!) But then my brain, now that it knows the idea has been captured, will stop bugging me about it randomly.
The hyper-focus mode is good when I just want to write. It's a little hard to describe if you don't have ADHD, but it's like losing yourself in the work. It's like being in the writing zone.
Personally, I find the trick to be in learning how to trigger the two modes. Or sometimes, just realizing that it's impossible and indulging one or the other for an evening.
But you're right, it can mean it takes longer to write a story. But I think the quality can also be higher. I am S-L-O-W at creating stories not because I write slowly, but because I'm forever fussing at possibilities and connecting things. However, the finished Christmas tree will have many pretty hand-made ornaments. :)
ADHD Connection In Writing
Thanks, Jenny. That's quite eye opening. I hadn't realised it was part of ADHD for some people. I can see how though. It can be quite distracting when I'm trying to write. And equally I find it very hard to getting down to even starting if I have distractions elsewhere.
It's my theory, and as far as I know the literal logic for a lot of mental health issues, the functioning of your brain/mind is perfectly normal (for however much a thing in your head that creates thoughts can be normal) until it causes problems for you. Then you might need or want help with it. Someone to talk to or sometimes medication. I'm glad I brought it up now. <3
Very true!
I think that's absolutely right...and certainly over the years I've learned some techniques to manage distractions and maintain focus. But in many ways, for me, it's just how my mind works.
It reminds me of a time several years ago when I was temporarily on a new medication, and the nurse was asking me to see if I was experiencing any side effects. She listed off several, like sleeplessness or heart palpitations, or unusual thought patterns. I asked what she meant by "unusual thought patterns." She said, "Oh, like if your thoughts are fast or random." I just looked at her and said, "Fast and random is normal for me." :)