Writer’s Block Part 2

In the earlier blog post that I did on ‘writer’s block,’ I explained that it doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t. Go ahead and go back to the blog post. This will be here when you are done.

In this post, I will give some was that I have gotten out of the feeling of ‘writer’s block’ or what I like to call a creative slowdown. Be warned though, these are kinda like trying to get rid of hiccups. They don’t all work when you want them to.

The first strategy that I usually do is that I keep in mind that ‘writer’s block’ is a phobia and doesn’t actually exist. It is best to keep positive, and it has been shown that positive thinking works overcoming a wide range of problems. I keep that in mind when I feel a slowdown. It helps when I feel the pressure and the stress of having deadlines and a long list of projects that may make me feel overwhelmed. It is a hard thing to do as the media and the like portraying the author as a tortured soul that wears fedora’s and suffers from a creative slowdown.

Brainstorming is the second strategy. I don’t suffer from the lack of ideas, as I have dozen’s of manuscript titles all wanting to be the next one on the list. But I usually do feel a creative slowdown when I run into a problem with the current work in progress.

My current project I have going on is the middle-grade sci-fi that I am writing with my son. I have finished the rough drafts of book two and three. At the end of book two, I felt like the ending blew. It did a read through, and an edit and the ending is limp, lackluster and just plain wrong. This killed the last few hours of my writing session. It knocked me down. Then I started to brainstorm and to think about the ending and on ways that I could fix it. I now have a plan on how. I just need to do it.

The third strategy is what I do when I am in the middle of a first draft. I am working along, and then I realize that a scene sucks. It happens. I reread a paragraph and wonder what type of narcotics that I am on. This can stop me. I will go back to fix one word, then one line, then a full page. Then I have been working and reworking the same stuff for months before I give up and say that I have ‘writer’s block.’ All cause I can’t get past that point to create new work.

The best strategy is not to. When I feel like your work isn’t up to any sort of good standards, lower them. Drop them to the floor. Get past the point and keep going. If I am worried about losing that lousy section, use the highlight tool in my your word processor and make a note about the part, then keep going. Once I get rolling again, I raise my standards back up until I have issues again. The key is to get it down on the page.

The fourth is when I sit down at my writing station, and I pull out my ‘outline,’ and then nothing happens. I can’t get going. Nothing is working. I am thinking about other things. Like the lawn needs to be mowed, or that I will just watch one youtube video. Just one.

That is a major problem. It is the easy distractions of the mind. They take as many forms as there are stars in the sky. The best way to combat this one is routine. Get a place to write. Something comfortable and my own. Preferbly away from distractions. Then set upo time to write. Gwt into the routine that I write and most times, I will.

If that doesn’t work, then I must go to the fifth strategy, get out of the house. Maybe I need a change in your environment. I go to a coffee shop or a bar. A library is good too. Get out and write elsewhere. It can pull me out of my slump.

The sixth way, is to know what I am planning on writing. It doesn’t mean that I have to have an outline. Just a couple notes on what I was going to do may help. Some writers intentionally don’t finish the scene that they were working on so that all they have to do is to read what the had of the last scene and then it’ll flow. This way doesn’t always work for me.

The seventh way that I have is that I will challenge myself to write a low number of words. Like 250. Then I find that when I get 250, either I am done for the day and I move onto the next strategy or I find that I have pumped out a  thousand words and I am not stopping.

The eighth way is that after I have attempted a couple ways to stop the creative slowdown, I go and read a book. I pick it up the next day. During the rest of the day, I will think about what I have in the story and see if my brain will come up with anything. It does. usually when I am trying to sleep.

I hope that this helps.

Until next time.

 

‘Writer’s Block’

The evil ‘Writer’s Block.’

There are many different opinions that people have about this evil thing. I am not going to get into the different schools of thought.

Mine, it doesn’t exist.

I shall say it one more time to make sure that you fully understand that I am being clear.

‘Writer’s Block’ doesn’t exist.

Not is the sense that it is often portrayed. People say that they are blocked from writing and that they can’t write a thing. That they are suffering from a disease that stops them from creating a plot and story. Like asthma stopping a person from breathing. And sometimes, not being able to do something that you want to do may feel like it.

But I call bullocks to it.

I get times that I feel like I am drowning in the story. I lose interest in it as I have lost track of the characters or I have lost track of the plot. Or I took a wrong turn that ended up in a dead-end and now the story isn’t meshing for some unknown reason.

The way I write is that I don’t do a full outline and I am not a discovery writer. I do what I call Signpost Writing. The Signpost method is that I come up with a very loose rough ‘Outline’. Usually in the form of scene ideas that I intend to write to. For example, I want a really cool fight scene so I will write my way to that scene making sure that things are set up and foreshadowed along the way.

When I get stopped, it is usually that I have come up with something different that I hadn’t thought up before and that now the rest of my story isn’t meshing. At that point, I have to figure out what is wrong with the story and fix it. Either I need to fix my remaining signposts, or I need to go back and fix written parts of my story.

It happens all the time, and once you recognize the signs of it, it is easy to combat. Frustrating when you have deadlines to meet, but treatable.

Now there is another form of ‘Writer’s Block.’ Where you want to write a story, but you can’t come up with a good idea. You start thinking about an idea, then you realize that it has been done before. That you have been simply replaying a movie that you remember. And that is okay too.

The first rule of storytelling, all ideas have been done before. The movie Avatar is the same story as Pocahontas or as the Story of Moses. But all three stories are very different from one another.

If you feel that you are being blocked by the lack of ideas, then you need to brainstorm. Start small, then go big. Come up with a small idea that you can build off of. A cool weapon, magic, or a fight scene. Or even a cool character. Start asking questions about him/her. Start giving the character a backstory and a history. Don’t worry about a full story, after you start brainstorming, the story will emerge from the brainstorm.

I may write another post about my method of brainstorming in a future blogpost.

I hope this clarifies my view of ‘Writer’s Block’ or the lack thereof.

Until next time.

Update: Dec 9, 2017

Well, time is a fickle thing. It tends to run slowly at some points, usually when you don’t need it to. Like when you are waiting for something to happen. Like when you are waiting for work to end.

Or time will go really fast. Like when you are having fun, or you are on a vacation or the weekend. At that point, time is like a runaway train that doesn’t seem to want to stop. One moment you are yelling TGIF, the next it is Monday Blues.

Well, time has slipped by, and it is now December 9th, 2017. It is almost Christmas. I have yet to walk into a shopping center to buy a single thing. Our Christmas tree is still in the storage bin. I do not have the time to get myself out there to get it all.

The last post I did was the lyrics of a song that I altered. Well, I didn’t modify it. It was my wife. You see, I have been prepping a novel idea, the Inescapable game, that I am going to pitch on the Archivos Podcast. In the new year, I am scheduled to go on the podcast. I will pitch the story idea to the crazy guys, and we will be brainstorming it. So I thought that I should have a couple points of the story fleshed it out.

Well, I have a fickle issue with world building. I love worldbuilding, but I also hate having to spend too much time doing it. I’d rather be working on the actual story than the world. So to combat this, I tend to create worlds that I can write multiple stories in. My Agersolum world, I have at least a dozen stories planned for it.

To get back to the point about those lyrics, I have figured out a way to attach my Inescapable Game to my 500 Years Universe. Then I figured out how many novels that the Inescapable Game story will stretch to. I plan to write 15 books in the series. Split into three parts.

It was at that point that my wife started to sing that dreadful song.

So that is the backstory to that last post.

Until next time.

The Adventures of Evana Sweetland

As you may be aware that I have been writing a middle-grade fiction novel with my 5-year-old daughter. It was her ideas that I write and it is her story. I had finished the rough draft during NaNo and now I have finished giving it an edit. I polished it up.

It still needs work. I need to run it through a good text to speech program that’ll allow me to maybe see some things that I didn’t see before.

But the look on my daughters lap when I plopped the printed pages onto her lap. It was priceless. My son read the first couple pages out loud. He is already finding sentences that aren’t clear. I have given him a highlighter.

Until next time. Keep writing.

It’s a good start…

Well. NaNo is upon us, and that small statement has reminded me of a little meme. 

Well, I am not sure that is a meme, but a twitter post. But no matter. This is very true.

For those that don’t know, Inktober is when the artist draws a new ink drawing each day for a month. The picture can be as complicated as they want. That means that Inktober can be quiet easy. For those that can draw at least.

NaNo, however, is fifty thousand words in thirty days. That is huge. That can be challenging for some people.

Me, I have gotten off to a good start. It is the end of Day 2, and I am supposed to be at 3333 words. I am at 8000 words.

How am I doing that you ask? Well, I am glad that you did. First is that I type fast. I don’t type properly, but I do my own version of a chicken peek that seems to work for me. And I have started getting up at 5am.

That means that I have close to three hours before I must leave the house to go to work. That is a lot of words each day.

But that is what it takes to do either challenge. Take or make a piece of your day separate for your craft. And then protect it. I get up at 5am to do just that. And so far, no one is crazy enough to get up at that ungodly hour to challenge it.

So until something changes, I may be able to get my double NaNo goal done on time. But it is still too early to tell.

Anyways, I am off to bed. 5 am comes fast. Until next time.

Futurism: Mars Part 2

In this blog post, I am going to go into details in the different changes that happens to the Martian Colony over time.

The obvious one is that the colony grows larger. With 12 different colonies with different agendas and sponsors from earth, Mars becomes a real life version of the computer game Civilization. A hundred years and multiple generations pass. Most colonists, no matter which colony that they are from view themselves as Martians first and only the place of there ancestry grudgingly.

But before the advent of hostilities between the different colonies, the situation changed.

The colony’s themselves have a wide range of different problems and issues that must be fixed. The biggest one is taxation. The sponsors of the colony’s take a large portion of any money made by the colony for themselves before it is left to pay it’s people. Little money is reinvested in the colony itself and the expansion and maintenance of it comes out of the colony’s own funds.

From the colonies, all of the industries of space were controlled. The bosses all lived on the earth, but the people fixing the machines, building the probes and sending shipments back to Earth were all from Mars. The governments of Earth came to rely on the money from the Martian colonies more and more. Each year, they took more and more to support the failing societies on the planet Earth.

The colonists were also not allowed free travel between the different colonies. All communication between the colonies are controlled and regulated. Only official communications can happen. That means friends can’t have a phone call if they love in a different colony.

The colony’s are also directly controlled from mission control back on Earth with the colonists themselves having no say in what they do. They are only there to carry out there orders and not to question the minds of the people on earth.

The only colony not following orders in that regard, the only one that has gone off the reservation, is the first one. The Mars Corp. They are considered very rebellious in nature. Doing what they want and not listening to the corporate bosses. The bosses are happy about it. There profits are high, while the other colonies are barely surviving.

Then the corporate bosses of Mars Corp does the insane crazy thing. They move there Head Quarters from Earth, to the Mars Colony. They also move all of the personal that want to go and there families. The colony pulls all ties from earth except to pick up new immigrants to the colony.

Mars Corp becomes the first Mars Colony to become free. Free from the tyranny of being ruled by a group of people millions of kilometers away.

The other colonies took notice. The Mars Corp sent messages to each colony offering assistance with there transport shuttles if required.

Earth-side blocked all communication to Mars Corp. They couldn’t help as no message would go through.

Then after a couple years, one of the colonies failed. The one sponsored by the European Union. A sand storm damaged there oxygen processing and there power generation. An easy fix if you have the supplies. Mars Corp had the supplies. No message went through.

The colony went dark. It was two weeks before the news got out. A rouge agent of the EU Space Agency leaked the news to the colonies. Tensions boiled and 125 years after the first colonist set foot on Mars, the people rebelled.

In the year 126, the United Colonies of Mars was created. This started the first inter-planetary war as the governments of Earth cried out from the lack of money to run there nations.

Again. Information that probably will not make its way into a book, but this sets the stage on what the People of Mars are like.

Next time. Terra-forming. A mistake? Or intentional?

 

Futurism: Part Two

In part one, I talked about how the first colonists got off of the Earth and some of the reason’s behind it. In this post, I am going to talk about more specifics on how a corporation could make money sending people to space.

The first question the inevitably comes up is the extraordinary cost of getting anything into space. I’ll leave the politics out, but that basics of it is that it will cost approximately $10,000 per kg to send anything into Low Earth Orbit and approximately $30,000 per kg to send anything into Geosynchronous Orbit. Please note that LEO is anything around 160km to 2000km above the surface of the earth, while Geosynchronous Orbit is 35,786km above the surface of the earth. That means that it currently costs $75,000 to send an average human into LEO and 2.25 million to send one to Geosynchronous Orbit.

That price tag is huge. Impossibly huge. It is a huge barrier to human space exploration that it is what is holding everything back. It is not the risks to humans or the technologies that have to be devolved in order to make it work. It is money alone that is the barrier to space exploration and if anyone says otherwise, they are lying.

The biggest part of the cost to space exploration is the insane amount of fuel and material that it takes to get the cargo out of the gravity well of earth. The cost of moving cargo around the solar system is far cheaper. I am sure that you noticed the difference of moving cargo to Geosynchronous is only three times the cost for 17 times the distance.

A company can make a huge amount of profit by mining ice asteroids and providing the clean drinking water to the ISS. And that is only the tip of the iceberg for the amount of opportunities out there.

There are asteroids out there that are comprised of a large amount of rare earth metals. These metals are what make computers and modern life possible. But they are called rare earth metals because they are rare on earth. Out in space, however, they are not as rare as they are on earth. There is a nearby asteroid that has more platinum on it that has been mined from the earth since we knew of its existence.

That can be done by robots up to a point. At some point it becomes essential for humans to go and live in space. Only certain experiments can be done in a micro gravity and then there is the entire question of the asteroid of death issue that a multi-planet species will fix.

Once they get to space, human’s have a wide range of different needs that will need industries to meet. The best way to do that is to produce those goods in space. Where they don’t have to pay for the goods to be shipped out of the earth’s gravity well.

That means that the best way to develop long term space colony’s before we are able to build a space elevator is to cut the earth out of the equation for as many things as possible. No high prices of goods from Earth brings down the cost of living in space.

In my fictional world, that is what the corporations fight for and get. The ability to go space and the ability to ship materials back to Earth and to expect to make a profit of goods and services.

These corporations start by mining asteroids and building space stations in space. The develop Mars as a Space Colony and it is the private industry moving forward that prompts NASA to send a space mission cause heaven forbid a private industry getting to space before NASA.

That brings up a rather large amount of different issues as well, which will be talked about in a later blog post. Most of which aren’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things as the the story takes place in 2500 CE and not 2025 CE.

The story world changes from the time of the first explorers and settlers to the time of Des and the Jovian Empire. Just look at how life was like at 1525 CE to now in 2017 CE.

Next time I will go into more detail on what I think that brief history of what happens to each of the planets. Well, maybe one planet. We’ll see how it goes.

Rambling: Encouraging others to write.

In many ways I am an enabler. I enjoy having others find enjoyment in things that I find enjoyment in. That I have passion in. I enjoy it so much that I don’t shut up about it.

I have been criticized for obsessing about my passions and my interests.

Is that criticism justified? Warranted?

Probably.

I know that I obsess over things. It is how I am able to write about my books. Fix my house. Go to work or get out of bed. By obsessing over things, I am able to focus on something long enough to see results in that avenue.

Even if I wish that I can hit the snooze button again and go back to sleep.

My obsessions is what gets me into trouble and out of trouble. (Like watching 18 hours of a game on Let’s play and then buying it for way too much money.) I obsess with keeping a roof over my kids heads, which makes me go to work and take Overtime hours. I obsess with my half completed house renovation so that I can keep getting things done in it. Maybe one day I will finish it. I also obsess about my writing.

My writing is my passion in life. They say follow your passion and this is it.

Writing.

Writing novels, writing for my kids, writing for the complete stranger so he gets a kick out of my work. Every day I spend most of the hours thinking about some story. How to fix it, how to make it better, where to go with it. Or a new story idea that will distract me from my current work in progresses.

At the beginning, I said that I am an enabler.

What does that mean? Most people think of it as a bad thing. That I am a bad guy for encouraging someone to do something. And it can be. If I was a drug addict or a drunk.

But I am not. I cannot afford to do those things. I am a writer after all…

I enable people to follow there passions. Follow there enjoyments even if it is just as a hobby and part-time. Even if they only dabble and are not serious about completing it. I do, however, mainly encourage people to write books. Read above about my obsession.

And you may ask why? Why enable people to write books?

The answer to that question is selfish. I do it cause it is lonely over here in writing land by myself. Writing is considered a solitary affair. You sit in a room by yourself writing about make-believe people in make-believe lands doing impossible and crazy things. With no one to talk to but the people in your head…

I just realized how crazy that makes me sound…

Anyways, writing is mostly solitary. But there are times when a writer must talk to other people. Other writers. It gives encouragement and it can make you responsible for getting the work done. (Like trying to explain why your word count hasn’t moved in two weeks, but look at what you have done in that game you play.) It also helps you grow as a writer as you can learn from other people. Learn from there failures as well as there successes.

I encourage people to write as there is a lack of a strong writing community where I live and the only writers that I talk is through a Facebook group. Most are from the U.S. and I will probably never meet in person. I hope that by encouraging people to write that I can build a small writing community of my own.

Or I am a crazy obsessive compulsive who can’t stop shutting up about my make-believe characters in my make-believe world who all live in my head. You decide.

The Horror! The Torture! The College Students!

Well. It’s been a while since I talked to you all. Today I am going to talk to you about perspective and beginner writers.

There are many different people that will have there own opinion and knowledge on the subject. Many of whom are much smarter than I am and are much better writers as well.

But today I am going to give my opinion on the subject as I am an opinionated S.O.B. and I feel like standing on the soap box.

You see, yesterday I wrote the majority of this blog post in a tiny note book as I was being tortured by an unspeakable horror. I was taken captive by my wife to go to listen to her college creative writing class read portions of there ‘manuscripts’. (Please note that I did find about four of the story exerts enjoyable. My wife’s was included in that number.)

I use the term manuscript lightly.

In there defense, they are all mostly beginners and they don’t know any better. They don’t know about show, don’t tell (unless you want to). They don’t know about proper dialogue techniques. Or plotting methods to make a story easier to plot out. They don’t know about a lot of things that only experience gets you.

But all of that is okay. I can usually ignore those mistakes and enjoy the moment. I can usually try and turn off that critical part of my brain. To simply enjoy listening to these passionate new writers enjoy the beginnings of their journeys as writers. But I couldn’t. Not that night.

Which is why I wrote this blog post on a tiny note book at the back of the crowded room.

The reason for my lack of enjoyment was the fact that most of the writers wrote their pieces in First Person Perspective. Author after author did it. Like herpes, it spread to most of the class and wouldn’t go away.

So as I sat there, I wondered why did they do it? The first answer to jump into my mind was that it is a college setting and it is all ‘Literary’ fiction. And that theory is possible. But there was a fantasy novel and a historical one. There was a Horror and a couple comedies. Maybe the fact that colleges push the notion of ‘Literary’ fiction isn’t the case.

Maybe the teacher gave them permission and encouragement to do First Person? And that theory is also possible. The teacher is trying to get them to put pen to paper and if a student was going to write in first, who is he to stop him. She is writing, right? Right?

Or maybe the students were all lazy and thought that writing it in First Person was the easier way to go? They are college kids after all and most of them don’t have fine arts majors. This class was supposed to be an easy elective to break up the hardship of their major. A reprise.

My theory is that it is a mix between the second and the third theories. The teacher gave permission and encouragement. And the students were just being lazy. The students took what looked like the easy road.

But is First Person Perspective the easier way to go. Is it easier than Third Person Limited?

My opinion is no. It is not easier. It seems like it at first glance. Like that flat straight farming road. No turns or curves as far as the eye can see. But just beyond sight are dangers. by taking this road for it can quickly turn into a mud pit if you don’t tread carefully.

First Person is more restrictive than Third Person Limited.

In First Person you can’t see or hear anything outside of the range of your main character’s sight and hearing. If the main character can’t see it or hear it, they don’t know about it.

That leads to situations where it is impossible to move the plot forward. Or the plot moves forward but the writer has no way to tell the reader what is going on as the main character doesn’t know. It is also very hard to hide anything from the reader without coming off as cheating.

It is very hard to jump back and forth in time and forget about showing a different characters Point-of-View as writing a book with multiple First Person Point-of-View’s is not something anyone should try. Too many ‘I’s’ to keep track of. There is no ‘I’ in team.

In Third Person Limited, you are inside the Point-of-View of one specific character. You can hear the thoughts of that character when you want to. Or not as you see fit. You can’t, however, hear the thoughts of other characters around the Point-of-View character.

That is Third Person Omniscient and different than Third Person Limited. Also not apart of this blog post.

In Third Person Limited, you can run into similar problems as First Person. It is limited as the reader is only experiencing what the Point-of-View character experiences. He has no knowledge of what is happening on the other floor, etc. But with Third Person Limited, you can always jump into the Point-of-View of another character to let the reader know what was happening. If is easy to hide things from the reader without coming off as cheating.

Like First Person, you are still describing the setting, etc from the Point-of-View’s perspective. The intimacy that comes from a First Person Perspective story is still in a Third Person Limited, but just less of it and only at the authors discretion. However, with Third Person Limited a standard pitfall is the characterization coming off as hollow or only skin deep.

So does First Person have a time and place to be used?

Simple answer. It does.

On the other side of an airlock.