Why are you so fickle?

I know the answer, of course.  My writer brain has been unfocused lately because I have been unfocused lately.  I have not kept regular working hours (or days, for that matter), nor kept myself focused on any single project (of which I have too many in need of work even were I the most disciplined and undistracted of writers).  When I do that, my writer brain goes into tinkering mode, and thinks about whichever projects it feels like thinking about.  Sometimes they are even the project I’m supposed to be working on.  For instance, the other day I realized I needed to go back and kill somebody off in my novel-in-progress, both to crank up the pathos and also to provide some motivation a little later on for my protag to think about turning into a good guy.  I even went back and started in on changing what I needed to change (there was also a firearm to dispense of; way too powerful a tool to put in the protag’s hands at this point in the game).  I’ve also had some notions about Cowboys and Indians, which I think will be pretty good once I get through this next revision.

But what I’m really excited about, apparently, Continue reading “Writer Brain, Oh Writer Brain” →

I have too many irons in my creative fire right now.

It’s my own fault.  There were a couple of months recently when I was working a lot and didn’t have time to write (correction: didn’t make time to write).  Without conscious direction, my creative subconscious likes to go all monkey-mind on me, and just putter around in the workshop, tinkering with this and that project or half-formed idea lying about in various stages of completion.  Continue reading “My Mind is a Raging Torrent*” →

It’s not that I hate you, it’s just that you’re not good enough yet.

Okay, I admit it.  I kind of hate you.

The problem is that I need you to do a lot of things very quickly.  Partly this is for reasons of craft, but mostly it’s because nobody knows who I am yet.  I don’t have a name.  So I’ve got to grab you, the reader, right away.  I’ve got to get you hooked, let you know where you are, where you might be going.  Who’s after you and what they want.  I’ve got to set expectations that you’re going to want to see fulfilled.

Then I have to fulfill them, but Continue reading “Dear Opening Paragraph:” →

Something I’ve noticed in the long-form fiction I’ve been writing lately is that my stories do not fall readily into the traditional chapter breaks one might normally expect in genre fiction.  Maybe it’s all the lit-fic I’ve read over the years, but I find what works best for me, structurally, is something akin to what Roberto Bolaño did with 2666, which is to break the story up into large sections which themselves are broken into much smaller pieces (generally 500-2500 words, at least in my case), which flow more or less continuously on into one another. Continue reading “Small Episodes” →