[Short] Piecing Together A Story, Step By Step.

WARNING: Post may be considered self-indulgent and boring. Skip if you are supremely uninterested in hearing how some amateur writer tries to write short stories.

'Breathing In Gerry Neimeyer' is well under way, but I thought I would put together a post that details how I go about piecing together a story from the original idea to the written word. Questions about where writers find their ideas tend to be the first ones asked by those who are not writers. The reason you'd never hear a writer ask such a thing is because they know how complex and improvised the process is. About as close as you can get to providing a satisfactory answer is to write a blog post like this one and try to include as much detail as possible.

More after the jump.

Why Do We Hate Bella Swan?

Post moved to the new site.

Distractions: A Writer's Guide, Part One

For the afflicted writer, I have compiled a list of distractions, their common symptoms, and what you can do to avoid being ensnared by them. Listed in no particular order, they are equal bastions of procrastination.

If I can save just one paragraph, it will have all been worth it.

The sneakiest of all distractions, books are able to masquerade as 'research' to convince you that you are not procrastinating. Don't believe them. They are lying to you.

Signs you are distracted:

• Intellectual Stimulation
• Vivid Fantasies, often accompanied by emotional highs and lows
• A sudden, unexplained increase in vocabulary
• Words Read : Words Written ratio beginning to sound like something C-3PO would say



The odds of successfully finishing a book at this rate are approximately 6,245,000 to One!

Solution: Read only terrible, truly awful books. Not only will you not be able to continue reading, you will be convinced that you could write a better book with one arm tied behind your back.

The junk food of the media world, Television and Video Games are good at what they do, which is stopping you from writing. In fact, a good enough game or TV show will make you forget to eat, which technically makes them even more insidious than junk food. I guess that means they're more like the Alien of the media world - the perfect procrastination weapon.

Signs you are distracted:

• Carpal Tunnel from mouse clicking
• A groove in your sofa that is supiciously the same shape as your arse
• Dozens, if not hundreds, of empty red bull cans scattered around the TV/PC
• Square eyes (And you thought your mother was joking)
• A mild form of Vampirism as you become ultra-sensitive to sunlight

Get away from that Manuscript, you BITCH

Solution: Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Oooh boy. You're Gollum, and the Internet is the Ring. You need it and it needs you. Of the two participants, User and Internet, one is the host body and the other is the tapeworm that lives in its guts. Which one is which is unclear at this time.

Signs you are distracted:

• You are reading this
• You know what a 'lolcat' is
• You have not bought a CD since 1996
• You have not bought a newspaper since 1997
• You own a PC.

NO IT DOESN'T, Cat.

Solution: There is no solution. Hercules thought it was hard to kill the Hydra? The Hydra is a skink compared to the Internet. The best we can hope to do is learn to live with the Internet and hope that it will continue to allow us some minimal freedom. All hail Internet.

Within the labrynth of waste that is the Internet lie smaller traps that can ensnare the unwary writer. Twitter - A website that appears to champion brevity by limiting discussion to 140 characters, but instead winds up directing you to every single interesting thing on the internet and consuming days of your time. Facebook - a website designed to keep you in touch with your friends and family, you will spend most of your time here stalking people you barely know and arguing with religious fundamentalist relatives that you would otherwise only see at Christmas.

Signs you are distracted:

• You begin all your character names with an @
• You know what kind of cocktail you would be, or which character in the simpsons you are
• You recieved an @ reply from Neil Gaiman once and now refer to him as your friend
• You know exactly how many words every other writer in the world is writing

I am not, Facebook! Shut up!

Solution: Get incredibly drunk and say some regrettable things in your social networks. You will not be welcome back there, leaving you plenty of time to get on with the task of writing!


And thus ends part one. I shall continue this list in the near future when I'm need of a good distraction. Oh, which reminds me!

.... No. Next time.

Next time.

A digression to shorts

Re-writes were going like gangbusters, but then I had to move house. Also, I've talked about that for the last few posts and I'm sick of it, as I am sure are you. This post is going to be about an area of writing that I've neglected for years.

SHORTS

 

That's right! To distract myself from endless, and possibly fruitless, re-writes, I have decided that a shorter term goal might be for the best to kick start the confidence levels. To that end, it's time to think like an Australian and get into some shorts.

This post is subtitled 'The Idea'.

See?

I'm a Sci Fi nut since birth and there are literally hundreds of online and print magazines that will accept short-form Science Fiction stories, so it was a natural place to start. At conception, my thought process can be fully mapped in the following way:

I'd like to write a short story. Clarkesworld accepts submissions. Holy crap, so do heaps of places. I will write one, then. Okay. Cool. Let's get on that.

The point being that I had absolutely nothing in the way of plot, character or theme in my writerly tank to commit to paper. This would have to be a from-scratch production. I perused some old short stories of mine, which was a waste of time. I really ought to post one or two of them to illustrate exactly how much of a waste of time it was.

Finding no help from my past self (who is a jerk, by the way), I turned to some professional writers. I have a book in one of my moving-house-boxes that contains a bunch of fantastic space opera stories called 'The New Space Opera', and it was a fantastically distracting read. I loved them all. But even so, at the end of six or seven of those tales, I had nothing.

I wish I'd been around to tell my past self this. THIS is what I should have said to myself.

Then my boss said something that sparked one of those weird neuron-bending thought exercises that we all get on occasion. It was a particularly hot day and he was complaining about the smell of some of the people we were working with. He said:

It's thirty-seven degrees and there's no air in here. I have to keep breathing in other people. I hate summer.

It was the way he said it. "Breathing in other people". It'd make a good title, thought I, and so I picked a random name and applied it, deciding that this would be my story title. I ended up with 'Breathing In Gerry Neimeyer'. From there, it was crazy how things snowballed.

Why were they breathing him in? He died in the life support tanks. Who is breathing him in? The 16 year old disaffected son of two Korean engineers assigned to the Titan Settlement Project. How'd Gerry get in to the tanks? He tried to stow away. Or did he? Maybe he tried to sabotage the vessel. Why'd he do that? Well...you get the idea. You've all done it.

My outline is sitting pretty at 600 words. In the next post I'll talk about actually writing it, and how it's different from the novel. In the post after, I'll talk about workshopping it. And finally, I'll keep a track on how it goes on the submission circuit. I'll make sure that I begin each post with [Short] so that, if you'd like to skip these more boring, 'this is what I'm doing' posts, you can.

Until then! I'm off to keep bashing out these words.