Writr

I read Robert McKee’s book Story very recently, and have been playing around with the stuff he talks about. It’s a very mechanistic view of writing and the nature of story, and it’s primarily aimed at script writers, causing the prose novelist in me to scoff and say that’s fine for a screenplay because it’s a mechanistic art, versus the more artsy fartsy internal nature of prose.

Which of course is utter bollocks. But still, his view of the importance of outlining and setting up value charges in each scene robs the art of romance for me, so historically I’ve resisted it and gone for the method Stephen King outlines in On Writing - look at it as though you were a paleontologist unearthing a dinosaur, you dig in and find the spirit of the story. These two forces in my head battle constantly, my left brain wanting the clarity of an outline and my right brain wanting the spirit and romance of the more adventurous seat-of-the-pants approach.

So I’ve settled on more of a hybrid approach with the latest story. It’s to be a sequel to Kidnap over Dyra!, but this time I’ve written it straight as I did with Kidnap, before breaking the first draft down into scenes on 3×5 cards, throwing some scenes out and dropping others in, and eventually winding up with a full outline running to about a thousand words - the story itself will probably run at around four and a half thousand, and the thing will end up on Lulu just like Kidnap.

On Lulu, but not only there. I’m going to do a full rebrand of Daily Flash Fiction, primarily because it’s an awful name that sets up all kinds of false expectations in readers (specifically that it’ll be daily). I still don’t know what to call it, and the old domain will still go there, but instead it’ll be a base for serial fiction as well, sort of like Mike Stackpole’s serial fiction experiments. And the old Flash fiction will stay up there as well, possibly with an explanation.

On not-writingy-stuff news, I’m learning PHP in the hopes of being able to get a better day job, and I’ll probably play around with category-specific templates to separate the stuff in more of a clean manner.

So I’m approaching the end. All of the pieces are in place, we’re in the midst of the final battle, and strange lights have started falling from the sky. Or those might just be a delusion on the part of Our Hero. He’s been through a lot in the past months after all.

Looks like it’s going to be below target, but I already think I’m going to have to add a few chapters to flesh out some secondary storylines, including a very important minor character (for one of the major characters if not the plot as a whole) who’s dropped in the middle of the novel. Might be some shuffling too. But for all intents and purposes I’m nearly done.

So what does this mean? It means the Daily Flash may well be coming back at some point fairly soon, depending on prior commitments. I’m at least going to get a few in the can fairly soon so I can make a start. That’ll keep me going until the novel’s been edited and added too. I plan on fixing the main mistake that led to me dropping it in the first place - scheduling. I’m going to get about twenty or thirty in the can before I start blogging again, so I can get around problems I had last time (flashes turning out to be more involved short stories, for example).

I’m also editing a short collection of the current stuff up there for a lulu book. Which should be fun.

All my life I’ve been fascinated by the concept of transformation. In my early years I found the concept frightening - Doctor Who or the Daleks never disturbed me, but I could never watch the old Hulk series with Bill Bixby turning into Lou Ferrigno - I think it was the idea of letting something out, turning into something new, that upset my innate need for stability. But then, desirable transformations didn’t upset me at all - my favourite piece of childhood entertainment was, after all, called Transformers.

But as time has passed this fear has turned to fascination, until now I derive much joy from seeing different forms of transformation, be they into monsters or superhumans or anything else. I think that’s why, much as I love the western superhero tradition, I spend so much time watching eastern heroes like Kamen Rider - when the hero goes into battle, he literally transforms into his alter ego - rather than being the same person in a spandex suit, he gains new strength and new abilities and, in some cases, literally a new body.

I think this love of transformation is also what attracts me to writing fiction and stories - in the end, every story is about a transformation, be it a transformation of characters or a transformation of a world. Even if the hero or heroine awakes to find their experience a dream, they seldom walk away unchanged.

Personal Development, a recent interest of mine that precipitated the creation of my blog Hifelacking, is a further symptom of this deeper interest, and perhaps deeper need. I’ve been listening to a lot of Tony Robbins stuff lately, and he often talks about change itself taking only a second, something that reminds me of David Hume’s Bundle theory of the Self - the notion that a person is not an identity, but a loosely aligned collection of perceptions and experiences, and that identity is made up from these perceptions. All this means that we are all transforming from moment to moment, shifting being that only perceive a single identity.

Which is pretty cool.