At a Tremendous Pace

What's a better idea—taking a story at 2,500 words per day or 175?

Those were/are my average statistics for Phoenix Wright: Ace Tribute and Mayflies.

In some ways, it doesn't seem like I really had a choice. Ace Tribute absolutely demanded to be written to an extent I've honestly never experienced before. While my first NaNoWriMo novel (1,667 words per day) was rambling, inefficient, and confused, somehow this fan fiction turned out to be my pride and joy despite the frantic pace. Perhaps that's not the right way to phrase it. Is the pace really the independent variable here, or is it just a reliable measure of how darn inspired I was? I didn't set out to go at any particular pace at all. It just turned out to be over 7,000 words in the first three days, and it never slowed down that much until the very end. I honestly still don't understand how that story happened, and how it turned out all right. I may need an entire other post to try to work it out.

On the other end of the daily word count spectrum is Mayflies. Upon the start of the writing period in the 2YN class, I assumed an 80,000-word story and carefully calculated the rate I needed. My main error was assuming that I would take it up for NaNoWriMo last November, which I did not (in order to finish The Long and Winding Road instead, although that in turn ended up taking a backseat to Ace Tribute). I bumped up the word count from 160 or so to 175, and I may keep nudging it up. Usually I hit about 190 a day, anyway. The tiny goal, like most things, has both good and bad points. On the positive side, it's barely enough work to seem like a formidable obstacle when I'm not so inspired, so I'm able to go at it pretty steadily. On the other hand, my progress is slow. I don't mind terribly much, though. The charm of the story disappeared somewhere in the extensive world-building section of the 2YN class, so I find I'm not taking it that seriously as something I fully intend to publish. I'm just going to keep hacking away at it and seeing if it turns out all right.

It seems like inspiration is really the controlling factor when it comes to writing pace, but, at the same time, I can't always refuse to write when I don't feel like it. Admittedly, I haven't been dedicating much time to my stories lately because I've been busy with life-related things, but I still need some sense of discipline. How much can I make myself write before it seems like a chore? What do I consider a reasonable pace? How can I get motivated to write at that pace?

It's different for every story. Ace Tribute didn't require any outside motivation. Some of my other fan fictions just needed a few reviews to keep me chugging along. Mayflies just keeps going for the sake of all the time I've spent on it, and the idea that somewhere there's a worthwhile story to tell. I can't hope to be inspired every moment, but I can't just write 1,000 words of a story and kick it to the curb forever. I seem to have done that with Chasers and Piracy Cruise Lines, but I'm hoping to bring them back to the surface when I have few enough projects going that I can actually focus on them instead of just experimenting with the general idea.

What's your usual writing pace, if you have one? How heavily does it reply on discipline, or inspiration?

Abandonment Issues

Sometimes ideas go places. Sometimes they go places I don't want them to. And sometimes they just don't go anywhere.

In any case, a lot of stories just aren't going to see the light of day. That's part of the reason I'm sharing so many of my novel ideas—I have little interest in some of them, and some I may just never get to, but I feel like they all deserve a little bit of limelight time just for being nice enough to tap on my shoulder and amuse me for a while.

That being said, not every idea needs to be written. I've yet to find a story that beckons me to write it every moment of every day, but I still need to feel some sort of pull to do any actual writing. Ideas that are just a world without much of a story (as in the first draft of Wanderers), or characters without much of a story (as in Suture), or some such thing just can't draw me much. Even if I like the basic idea, I can't see anything happening in my head if, well, nothing's happening in it. I'm guilty of doing very little plotting before I actually start a story, but I'm fine with winging it if I've at least identified a few points along the journey.

Even if an idea comes with enough of a plot for me to get started, that's still no guarantee the book will be finished. If, for any number of reasons, I lose interest along the way, there's no promise I'm getting it back. I may not find the characters interesting enough to play with, and I would have to go back and change too many things (i.e., do too much work) to get another chapter out. I may start the fic without realising the scope of the story and what I'm getting myself into. I may start a story for the sake of fans rather than my own interest only to crash and burn halfway through. I may just stop caring because of life and time constraints. I have indeed finished a few fan fictions, and I completed NaNoWriMo last year, so I'm not always doomed to give up on my stories. I am somewhat scared by the number of those left incomplete, but I know I'm capable of finishing the writing of a story.

Of course, once the last chapter comes to a close, the story still isn't really finished. I hacked out 50,109 words for my NaNo novel and reached the concluding sentence, so it is in one way complete, but I haven't looked back at the thing since I uploaded my final word count. I don't know if I ever will. I have a certain writer friend who says I should look it over and try to publish it, and another who has browsed it and found it doable, but I'm still not sure. To be honest, I don't even know how I was able to stick with my one awkward idea for an entire fifty thousand words, let alone how I can summon the verve to revise the monster. It is certainly in no condition to be published at present, and I feel it's probably less than half the length it should be for its genre. I don't feel the pull to put that much effort into it. I proved I could finish writing a novel, but I want to go elsewhere to prove I can finish revising a novel. I don't know whether I'll get The Long and Winding Road or Mayflies into publishing condition first, but I am certain that both of them will beat out Dreadful Valley (the NaNo novel).

So, out of some 33 novel ideas to date, only five (The Long and Winding Road, Mayflies, Chasers, Piracy Cruise Lines, and Figments) have made it to the writing phase. Only The Long and Winding Road, Mayflies, and Piracy Cruise Lines are being written currently. Will they all be finished? Will they all be revised and sent off to be published one way or another? I can't say for sure until I've reached that point, but at least The Long and Winding Road and Mayflies are looking pretty good right now. I'll just keep working at it and hoping the muse will hang around where she ought to until I'm done.

The Four Levels of Inspiration

While I'm sure this varies from person to person, I've developed my own categorisation of that one thing held so dear to writers.

Inspiration Level Zero

"Maybe I can... No. Yeah, just no."

The ground-level reference for the four levels of inspiration, Level Zero is the point where the reserves are dry as Ezekiel's bones. I probably have some sort of plan for the chapter, and maybe I even have a few phrases in mind, but absolutely nothing goes from my head to my fingers, and I don't really care. This is my perpetual state for the story Break Out and rough ideas that vaguely caught my interest like A Murder of Crows.

Inspiration Level One

"Okay, I'm not sure what's going on, but once I get a sentence written, I'm sure the juices will start flowing. ...Okay, maybe once I get the next sentence done... Um, what goes in the next sentence, anyway?"

This is the point where I can pull some stringy, flavourless words out of me if I really try, but it's just not worth it. Maybe I don't have a clear enough idea of what's going on in the scene; maybe I've spent all of my verve on another story, or the same story earlier in the day. If this level persists for a few minutes, it's time to put up the Word document for the time being.

Inspiration Level Two

"So, uh, something happens in this chapter eventually. Not sure what. But hey, words are somehow coming out, so let's roll with it."

This is probably where I spend the brunt of my writing time. It's not very Romantic, but sometimes the words flow silently and unobtrusively. I make progress without feeling terribly excited, but this is the second-best level to feel like I've accomplished something. Beautiful gems can indeed rear their sparkly heads in this level, and joy can abound from this fact. Don't equate satisfaction with inspiration, though.

Inspiration Level Three

"Yes, it's finally the scene I've been waiting for! Writewritewritewrite... okay, this isn't quite turning out right... What am I doing wrong? Um, just keep writing for now..."

Level Three is when I'm honestly excited to write. These are the times that scene that I've watched play in my head several times finally comes into play, and I'm ready to churn it out. My confidence level, however, is no higher than in some lower levels, and once things go a bit sour, I'm not feeling so excited anymore, even if my beloved scene is still in-progress. This was my experience with things like the South Vietnam scenes in Break Out.

Inspiration Level Four

"GAHAHAHAHA!"

This is why people like me have to write. These are the times the scene falls into place while I'm trying to get to sleep, and throwing myself into the story makes my insides twist with emotion so much I have to take breaks to ensure I'm not just about to throw up. These are the times I grab the nearest notepad—regardless if it was reserved for, say, sketching chibis of some of the other girls at church camp—and write down the scene with so much speed and fury I can barely read the script. These are the times my heart's racing, no method can get the words out fast enough, and time vanishes as much as everything else. These are the times of lovely and utter madness.


Of course, inspiration is more of a continuous variable, so I can't always rank myself on one of these levels exactly. Sometimes I'll be just a bit more inspired than Level Two; sometimes I'll be just a bit less productive than in Level Three.

Do you experience inspiration in a similar matter? How would you rank your current level?

And There It Went

(Warning: Ranting ahead that will make you fear for my sanity.)

Inspiration is a fragile thing. Sometimes it just won't come; sometimes I finally grasp it only for my mood to shred it. Usually that will happen if I'm depressed by a lack of reviews or some such thing; however, there's a bigger emotional threat to my inspiration.

Few things will ruin my mood more than being interrupted.

I'm OCD enough about finishing things normally. I'll be biting back growls if a friend visits me in the middle of my doing a homework assignment, even if I could use a break and really like talking to her, just because I want to get things finished.

That, however, pales in comparison to how I feel when I'm interrupted in writing.

I have a tendency to stare at a computer without inspiration for a while in the name of discipline, and then, once I find something, I go after it like a maniac. And that's usually when my mother decides I need to rub her back, my father decides I need to rub the calcium deposit on his foot, the dryer goes off, Dad wants me to take out the trash, empty the dishwasher, sweep the floor, or do something totally non-urgent that in his philosophy always has to be done right this moment. All while expressing extreme disapproval at my slacking around all day beforehand. And by the time I've done my errands, suddenly an hour of my writing time is gone, something else to attend to is going on, and I'm so ticked off I'm no longer feeling any inspiration for anything (except possibly ways to orphan myself in a story), which in turn makes me more ticked off.

And the worst part is, that's just how life is. No one's going to just let me lock myself in my room all day and try to write. There are always things to be done and, frankly, if I don't do them immediately I'll probably forget about them. Everything's justified; I'm just whiny.

Any advice? Any similar issues in your creative life?

"That First Moment of Blinding Clarity"

The title is a quote from a recent pep talk for those in Camp NaNoWriMo this month. The writer asked us to recall the first time we clearly saw the characters of our novel, and, my current work being based on a fan fiction, I couldn't really join in.

I do remember some other moments where I met a character, or a story.

I was riding in the backseat of a car, just about to go over the highway, when a semi-truck crossed in front of us at a stop sign. On the grill were two jaws' worth of vampire teeth decals. I remember thinking that truck must have been its driver's baby. A few articles on steampunk later, the core of Macbay Transportation Services was born.

When I volunteered at the hospital, I ended up doing all of the filing they had ready for me in the main office and was transferred to the wound care centre. There I met my supervisor of sorts, whose name was Marisa. Not the English muh-RIH-sa, mind you, but muh-R-R-REE-suh. As on that morning I was on the lookout for characters for Contestant Zero, I suddenly saw a young woman named Marisa who was very particular about the pronunciation of her name. From that alone, she turned out to be the show's sassy Latina with a heart of gold.

The world of Crumbling hit me at about the second line of "Jesus is Coming Soon" while I was singing with others of my class at a devotional. It was incredibly awkward trying to shove the idea down for the rest of the song.

Later on the day I studied the nomadic section of world-building for my 2YN class, "Gypsy" came on the radio in the car, reminding me of that aspect of the week's lesson. Then "The Boxer" came on, and the plot of Roughhouse was born.

I was contemplating doing some humanisation of Pac-Man on my way to a sporting event. The ghosts were some sort of secret police force (thus their code names "Ink," "Blink," and "Pink") after the Pac-Man, who was attempting to evade them in order to not be caught for drug smuggling. I had just left the car and was walking through the parking garage towards the lift when I saw Pink in the lightless city, landing from a jump with one palm splayed over the ground for balance, her left leg bent, and her right leg straight out, the edge of her heel touching the asphalt. Such a look of determined fury was in her eyes I knew I couldn't change her, even if the story went through quite a few phases before becoming Chasers.

Chemists was born from a dream. Jacob and Scarlet were fleeing from unknown enemies and ended up in a shed, its wooden shelves filled with paint cans labelled "CELESTIAL MATTER" under a blue stripe. Jacob woke up on an aircraft driven by Martin and looked behind the cockpit to see someone controlling water and someone else directing a black, gel-like substance pulsing with jolts of blue electricity into a floating sphere.

Most of the time, I can't remember where I really got an idea, or how I came to elaborate upon it to a point I wanted to work with it. How about you? Have any of your characters stepped forward in blinding glory in the middle of a car ride? Anywhere else?

Fragments II

A sequel to Fragments, because the platelets of the idea universe will never stop coming.

On another note, I really need to work on my metaphors.

• Someone whose dream is to be a graphic T-shirt designer
• A character named Jovial Munk (at my father's request)
• Twin female telepaths, one who controls sugar and the other salt
• Terrorist retirement (after my mother mishearing "terrace")
• A manga about a foosball player
• An excuse to use "mediastinum" (dedicated to Dr. Li)
• Someone with the phone number 324-5873 (spells "failure")
• Some modern fantasy version of the Song of Everlasting Sorrow
• A man walks out to get his mail, sees a wasp, slaps it to the ground with the letters he just retrieved, stomps on it, and yells "SKILLS" before returning to the house (my father is cool sometimes)
• A super-steampunk megalethoscope
• Intelligent, demonic honeybees
• A maestro who can command heartbeats by conducting

Thou Shalt Not Judge (Except When it Makes for a Good Story)

Usually, it's not nice to pass judgment on people. You could always be right, of course, but that little bit of victory doesn't warrant jumping to conclusions and probably hurting the one judged.

However.

If you can jump to conclusions without actually jumping to conclusions—form hypotheses without assuming they actually apply—you can end up with some good story material. And the farther you go (or the more ridiculous, depending on your writing specialty), the better.

Let's say you're on your way to work/school, and as you pass the local running track, you catch a glance of a young woman. She's suitably fit and in what you consider to be normal morning running clothes, but she is currently sitting on a bench at the side of the track, sipping from a Starbucks cup. The first assumption you have is that she has either been out running or is getting ready to run. That doesn't explain the whole situation, though.

First, let's say it would be no one would go running with a full cup of hot coffee/whatever on earth else she's drinking from Starbucks. From there, we can take two basic routes.

One, she has not been running with a full cup of Starbucks and is drinking it before she hits the track. Makes sense—but why is she having her morning caffeine on an otherwise empty park bench? Maybe she's just enjoying the morning. Maybe she's pretending to just enjoy the morning. Maybe that other space on the bench had been taken up by her boyfriend, who then left her in both senses of the word. In fact, she doesn't have a habit of drinking coffee—she just left the bench to grab something bready and something sweet to drink to calm her buzzing mind, and she couldn't stand to stay around all of the people in that Starbucks when she's barely able to keep herself from crying. There aren't too many people that pass this way, certainly not many that would pay any attention, so she came back here, to a spot that she can no longer say is her favourite place to run.

Two, the cup is empty. She drank it before she started running, and there aren't any convenient disposal spots along the track, so she had yet to get rid of it when she caught a glance of her best, best friend from high school who stole her boyfriend and, just a few months ago, her job. Said best, best friend is leaving the tennis court in the middle of the running track, and the jogger was on route to run into her. Instead she decided to park it on a bench, pretending to drink some coffee so no one passing by suspects anything, until the best, best friend was gone. If they ran into each other again, the jogger would probably end up beating the crap out of her. That would not be a good thing to repeat.

But perhaps we're not interested in writing high school dramas. Luckily, as you pass the track and turn a corner, you see two men putting up a section of fence: one, who doesn't particularly stand out, squatting to hold the bottom down as another, topless and wearing bright orange pants, drives in some nails. It looks like something a prisoner would wear. But what is he doing in the street, if he is indeed an escaped prisoner? Did he have help? Did one of his helpers sustain a wound that required a little cloth to bind? How did he get out of that one?

Any normal human being would take note of such things, maybe find it odd, but shrug it off and keep moving. Writers, on the other hand, can keep chasing the most insignificant character on the side of the road—not with the car, hopefully, but with crazy trains of thought veering off to wild conclusions worth reading. Just try not to get anybody hurt.

Fragments

Novel ideas are just a combination of weird quirks that interest me enough to require toying with them. Sometimes, though, I only end up with one little fragment of an idea with no idea as to what to put with it. Here I will compile some of these fragments, and maybe I (or you!) can figure out what should go together, or what else should be brought in.

• An army mime (after seeing the words juxtaposed in a Scrabble solver)
• Some sort of traditional epic fantasy
• A family that possesses full-grown beards from birth that protect their owners (thanks to Caleb being weird after reading the surname "Beardsley")
• A world with no bodies, only voices
• A musical based on Journey songs
• An overly-independent disabled person learning to rely on others sometimes
• A modern day teen sucked into a fantasy world who insists on calling sprites "pixels"
• A family where all of the children are named after different types of tea
• A dark novel titled Thus Quoth the Raven
• Something with two cats sitting atop a car in a neighbourhood and chatting whilst sipping tea (because my eyes took too long to figure out that was just a ladder wrapped in plastic blowing in the wind...)
• Main characters called Lizzie and Ferd who are always at each other's throats
• A fight scene on the outside of this building
  

A Pearl Worth Writing For

Recently I've finally come to realize that (shocker) if I don't enjoy writing a story, it's really not worth the loads of time and effort I put into it.

This is an unfortunate realization for the readers of Break Out. I've really only been writing it for the readers. I had my fun in The Rules, but Break Out was the more seriously-taken sequel to explain why I was able to have my fun in The Rules. Negligible amounts of my own interest went into deciding to write the sequel. The chapter with France finding Canada wanted to be written, as did the chapter with Italy taking an unexpected turn (which was originally going to be in The Rules, anyway). That's it. I haven't plotted enough to know what happens at the point I've reached, and I've realized I don't really care anymore. I've only been writing my 2,500 words every four days for the readers' sake, and so few showed much interest the last chapter posted (until recently) that I just gave up on it.

I'm not promising I'll never go back to it. If it becomes of interest to me, or if I have a lot of extra time and pushy readers, I'm sure I'd be fine with writing some more. I already have the "normal" amount of reviews for the last chapter, so I'm not feeling quite so abandoned. It's difficult trying to balance what I want to do with what I should do for readers, but I've chatted with a good handful of friends (and my mother), and they've agreed that I just shouldn't write it if I don't want to—it's my hobby, for veal's sake. (If I do give on forever on Break Out, I'll at least post a summary of what was supposed to happen next, so no need to panic too much.)

At the same time, I hope I don't end up doing this with all of my original fictions. The Long and Winding Road is getting few enough reviews that I can be sure I'm not just writing it for the readers, and I'm not seriously thinking that I might lose interest in it. As for my other (future) fictions, at this point I don't know. I'm worried that I'll find myself losing interest in things and losing my discipline in the process. Hopefully that's just another unfounded accusation I'm making at myself, but I guess only time will tell. If nothing else, I've powered through all 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo with a fiction I was at no point proud to call my own.

What do you think? Any advice for me? Have you ever been in this sort of situation? What do you think makes writing worth it?

(Also, if the title sounds somehow familiar but you can't quite place it, here's your hint. I also mean "pearl" in the metaphorical sense, though hopefully that's not difficult to figure out.)

These Dreams

I had a bizarre dream this morning, but I can't remember it for anything now. It would have been nice to have the time to write it down.

I've been considering starting a dream journal for a while. My dreams rarely fail to amuse me, but just like my story ideas—or, more extremely than my story ideas—they fade in and out of my mind. I've tried just rehearsing events that happened, but if I don't write them down—sometimes telling others doesn't even do it—it'll be gone by the end of Genetics class.

Dreams are good for a lot more than vague amusement, too. The idea for Chemists came from one of my dreams. The idea for Entrapped came from the dream of a friend of a friend. Even if loads of pons firing is total rubbish, there are some interesting little gems to be retrieved in all of it.

Would you be interested in reading some of my dreams on here? I still have a few fairly recent ones—and the legendary twin squirrels dream—I could put, though I can't guarantee I'll remember anything that comes up later, or have any sort of predictability as to whether I dream something interesting or not. Nor can I say any of it will be worth reading, but it could give one of us some inspiration, I think.

Any recommendations for dream journals? I still have a mostly-empty moleskine (apparently they're a big deal) that I used a bit in NaNoWriMo, and I had been considering using it. I'm probably not going to be able to type everything up here in time, so I'll have to write it down somehow.

Also, I name a lot of my blog posts after songs...

The Scribes

I'm a part of my institution's writing club, the Scribes. It's not always particularly structured, but it's a lot of fun. Usually we start with a round of introductions, with one random fact (last time, it was favourite poem or song lyrics) since the same people don't tend to show up for every meeting.

From there, we can branch out anywhere. Most times we include an open session to just share ideas—I've put Macbay Transportation Services out there to get the idea an actual war is starting up aside from all of the empire stuff—but it's also neat to see what some of the others are doing. One girl just asked for help with one point of the plot she couldn't get past, and, while I wasn't useful at all in that one, I think we as a group helped a lot.

The idea-sharing is actually where I got the idea for The Long and Winding Road. One boy (I don't know why I'm referring to all of the members as children) decided to sort of jump on the zombie bandwagon, but to him it's not horror if it's not cannibalism, so he threw the idea at us that eating zombie flesh is the cure for zombieism. Another boy ran off with that and started a beautiful comedic idea for something set a while past the apocalypse featuring a zombie restaurant. My focus has kind of slipped away from the original, but I got both of the boys' permission and started up that fiction.

Aside from that, we do a lot of funny writing exercises. Some involve coming up with a plot when given a title. We get about five minutes and then share with the others. Invariably someone will come up with something involving either the Mafia or the total breakdown of society (apparently we might be anarchists). We've done one where we're given a plot and had to come up with the cast (or at least one character).

This week's exercise is the first time we've been given "homework," just because we ran out of time at the meeting. We all had to come up with two "themes" (we used that term quite loosely, as you will see), a setting, and a main character. We then randomly picked a character, a setting, and two themes, and we need to have a rough idea of the storyline by next week. I ended up having to write a 20-year-old female university student moonlighting as a sports team mascot, set in sixth-century Constantinople, with themes of revenge and flying time monkeys.

If nothing else, it's going to be interesting.