Taking Requests

[dr_pretentious]

I've just finished my second post in the Teaching Fantasy series for the Black Gate blog. I'll link to it here when it goes up, probably this weekend. This is the one about assigning "The Eye of Argon," and I think it's a lot of fun.

This week continues to be vastly better than the last one--I actually finished a thing. Did you know preschool-age children demand things of their caregivers three times a minute, on average? Studies Have Shown! And every parent I've mentioned that to has said something like, Yeah, and anytime you get two minutes off, the kid makes up for lost time by demanding the same exact thing fifty times in the next minute. So it amazes me that I was able to scrape together enough attention to finish something. It amazes me even more to look back on the scope of the things I used to finish before I had kids. What huge swathes of uninterrupted time I must have had.

Anyhow, now I'm mulling over what to do next in that series of posts, and what I'll do when I've worked my way through all the back-burner essays I have in mind already.

Suggestions, anyone? What would you like to see someone tackle in a discussion of teaching and fantasy literature?

Comments

[showingup.livejournal.com]

Whenever I read writers' recommendations for writing, they say, "The most important thing is to just write. Write a lot, read a lot, and write a lot."

I always looked at that and thought, "And this helps me how, precisely? If I know HOW to set about this, I WOULD damn well write!"

I can't be the only one who used to write reams as a kid, and then got slammed with a Bad Teacher and/or Perfectionism that demanded that I know how to go about plotting and putting pieces together. The big reason for not doing creative writing since I was 9 or 10 is that I was terrified that if I didn't know the basics of putting a structure together, any writing would be a waste. I can do a scene. Belief that I need to know The Rules before I start + fear of not writing polished prose straight off = keeps me paralysed (this is all slowly going away, but it has taken 30 years to push myself to a place where I can jot down ideas about a plot on index cards in pencil so it doesn't seem intimidating).

So I'd be interested in an article giving broad overviews of attitudes to structuring a story.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

I always remember your injunction to "make the first draft shitty", which has become a major part of my attempts to remove the Perfectionism that gets in the way of my own creativity and shouts at me that if I don't know PRECISELY what the project/idea/tiny fragment of writing will be, I have no right to even begin it.

Turns out, that was part of me pointing out that I needed to discover the general shape of the thing so that the first steps could be taken. And this brief video about writing a "discovery draft" went click. Oh, of course - this is the bit that gets referred to as world-building. It doesn't mean that writers necessarily have really clear ideas about what happens in their books, and then they piece it together in the full knowledge of how it will work. It means that you can write all sorts of stuff down that may well have no relevance to the story that is waiting to get out, or the ideas hovering in the ether waiting to be plucked - it can be observations that strike you, or whininess about not being able to write, or ANYTHING, as long as it's being written down... and then the best bits get transferred to another document/notepad straight away so that they get remembered, and they may sit and compost for a while, settling in and becoming usable stuff that can be put into the basic framework of the story as it emerges.

Very, very basic stuff, I know. And yet, I cannot be the only one to have spent a lifetime missing this stuff.

You will be amused to know that the library has notified me that 2 books I don't remember reserving have arrived:

* Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories by John Curran, which I just realised probably talks about this self-same stuff (discovery, composting, structures), and
* Plot & Structure: (Techniques And Exercises For Crafting A Plot That Grips Readers From Start To Finish) by James Scott Bell

No memory of them AT ALL. Hey-ho. Be sure your unconscious urges will find you out...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Does this mean you might still be working on your vampire comedy? Please say yes.

And I will definitely tackle process and structure. It may take a while for the right stuff to percolate in my backbrain.

Thank you so much for weighing in! I've been carrying around essay fragments in my head that I've been really excited about finishing, and then about half a dozen essays away was this gaping chasm after which I had no idea what I was going to tackle.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

Well, so far, I have:

* Written a poem and submitted it for a county-wide poetry contest. This freaked me out at the time, and yet Nothing Bad Has Happened To Me, so I found myself yesterday thinking I might write more Stuff and submit it elsewhere

* Taken to writing Morning Pages in pencil so that I am not intimidated by the permanence of it

* Begun writing in pencil on index cards bits of plot about a teenage girl who inadvertently saves the world with a copy of 'Le Morte D'Arthe'

What I have not done is continue with the vampire comedy. I think it's because I need to Do More Stuff and get my confidence up.

HOWEVER. I have NOT DELETED ANY OF THE VAMPIRE COMEDY!

[showingup.livejournal.com]

Oops. Hit the wrong key there. Anyway, it's in a folder on my desktop, and my aim is to take it out and look it over again in the new year. It feels like it has Something Special in it, and like I'm moving towards taking it up again.

I have been thinking for a while now that one of the big lessons I learned at school and from doctors as a kid was "Do Not Ask For Help", and yet it seems that everyone who achieves some of their dreams manages it only with the help of a pool of supporters and mentors. And I have been shy of asking one of my generation's great poets and fantasy authors for mentorship because I don't want to burden you. What I will do now, though, is ask questions that you might be moved to answer in your articles - my opportunity to suggest topics to you and get info that helps me (and so, presumably, at least one or two other beginning writers).

[showingup.livejournal.com]

PS. I mean it about your poetry and fiction.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Admittedly, while the kids are little, I don't have as much energy to offer to the world outside my household as I'm used to. But they're changing all the time, and I will eventually be able to say yes. So ask. Please trust me to tell you when I've got it to give, and when I'm not ready.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

grinning