Story Writing

I’ve got some ‘up and coming’ news today folks. Josh has gotten back into the swing of writing and managed to whip up a short story. It’ll be one of the first peeks into the world he’s making and I’m fairly certain he’ll be willing to have it posted here for our vast and sprawling audience to enjoy. I haven’t had a look at it yet myself, but that’s just a matter of shuffling some e-mails along. With any luck it should around the blog before the end of the week. Furthermore it managed to make me think; an act precious and rare these days.

I got it in my head that I should take a mad swing at making a short story to complement his and see what I could learn about the process. (Notice the sub-title on the header up there? Yeah) It was then I ran into an issue; stories are hard. Stories aren’t like blogging at all, and when you’ve not bothered writing one in eons it’s more than a bit of bitch to get back into the swing of things. I figured I could just waltz my way into Word and hammer out a couple pages about whatever took my fancy and we’d have a dual-piece good to go. That didn’t happen. On the plus side, I’ve learned a few things, and one of them is about pride.

I think I’ve gotten this blogging thing down pat. One of my earliest problems with making posts was the worry that somewhere out in the world, some strange person might read everything I’ve written and – oh here’s the kicker – not like it. Consequently I never really made posts unless I thought I had a huge topic all laid out in my head. There’s still a healthy amount of lingering influences of that sort of thinking floating around this place. You might note almost all of my posts are at least 400-500 words in length. It’s not because I think that number is special or that people are more liable to read posts of that length – no, I just tend to sit around refusing to make a post until I can conjure up a thought (or enough thoughts) to fill up that much space. It seems like it’s not a real post unless I have a rather substantial amount of text on my screen before I hit ‘publish’. It’s been an irritating habit I’ve both been temped to try obliterate and been mildly thankful for at the same time. After all, on one hand it means I tend to make rather big ol’ posts that absolutely no one wants to read and means this place will continue to have zero readers into the future, but on the other it means I get more typing done and might someday (after the millionth word) get a style that suits me.

Story writing, yes even short story writing has presented a similar and amplified problem. I don’t feel like I can make anything good out of a small tiny little idea that’d only take a handful of paragraphs to get out and consequently end up refusing to really write anything. It gets worse when I finally come up with an idea I don’t immediately despise only to realize it’d take at least a dozen pages to write it out in full, and I start worrying that it’ll be too long. This is compounded by the pride issue I mentioned way up above – I’m worried some one might dare judge me on what I write. The latter is an issue that I’ve oddly enough managed to cut out of the way entirely when blogging, so it left me a touch confused when it came back in such force now.

I realize the best solution to all this might be to take the same approach we’ve seen some success in with blogging and vlogging. Take a mad stab at it and even if you fail horribly at least you’ll have learned something and it costs little more than pride to simply reset and try again. It’s just saying (or typing) that tends to be a hell of a lot easier than finding the motivation to do it. A blog is easy; you sit down and begin to type with only the faintest idea of what you want to say in mind. Hit the keyboard and go. Stories need at least some semblance of planning in mind; an outline so things actually make sense and keep a good pace. All that still applies if you want to make a short story and it leaves a huge amount of room for self doubt. This means I needed to come up with a better idea, y’know, besides just violently hitting Josh for bringing this up.

The best of the best my brain could come up with on short notice is collaboration. This is to say at some point in the coming week we’re going to dust off Josh’s story and fancy it up before posting the thing, when doing so I think I’m going to have to interrogate him on his world again. With some luck and an endless supply of questions I’ll hopefully come across some element of it that needs to be fleshed out properly, and I’ll do my best, as dubious of a statement as that might be. I’d make a promise here that it’ll get posted soon, but we’re still running on the new policy, so hell if I know when I’ll get this done. Wish me the best of luck and maybe we won’t all go insane reading whatever I produce.

A warning though; if you do start bleeding from the eyes when you read it please stop. I don’t have the money to pay for any potential bills that come with handling crazy people.