In Today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* The Bradbury Challenge Report
* A Note re Of Interest
* Of Interest
Quotes of the Day
“After you make a fool of yourself a few hundred times, you learn what works.” Gwen Stefani
“Maybe the goal isn’t to describe what a character looks like. Maybe the goal is to describe what it’s like to live inside that particular body. That sounds like the same thing, but I don’t think it is at all.” Sarah (Sally) Hamer (see “The Mirror Is Not Your Friend” in Of Interest)
The Bradbury Challenge Report
Participating in any challenge is a great way to have fun and grow as a writer.
The requirement is to write at least one short story per week, then let me know the title, word count, and genre per the format below. During the past week, the following writers wrote these new stories:
- Christopher Ridge “Foul Ball” 2415 horror
- Dave Taylor “Solo Diver” 2416
- Glynn Young “News from Washington” 2055 General
Congratulations to all of these writers.
A Note re Of Interest
Of the first two articles in today’s Of Interest, both written by Lynette Burrows for the Writers in the Storm website, the second article is a continuation of the first. (The third article is not related to the first two and is excellent.)
I skimmed the first two articles, but I didn’t fully read or vet either of them, mostly because of the underlying premise that it is even possible (much less preferable) to consciously construct an authentic fiction.
You can consciously, block by careful block, construct a fiction, but not an authentic fiction. That is, you can’t convey your characters’ story by thinking it to life with your conscious mind. Constructing an authentic fiction isn’t possible, period.
To me that’s an all-important distinction, because if a story isn’t authentic—if it isn’t the actual truth of what happened—why bother?
You can’t construct an authentic fiction with the conscious, critical mind anymore than you can “create” an outline with the creative subconscious.
- An outline is strictly a product of the conscious mind because you have to think your way through it.
- Authentic fictions are strictly a product of the creative subconscious. It’s basically you reporting the events of a story and the reactions of the character. If you think your way through it, you’re making stuff up, and it’s all false.
If you don’t believe me, try constructing an outline for a novel with your creative subconscious. Again, you can’t.
To write your characters’ authentic story, you have to close off the conscious mind, open your creative subconscious, and simply let the events of the story and the characters’ reactions to those events flow.
To compare consciously constructing a story to suit yourself with cleanly “receiving” and recording on the page an authentic story directly from your characters—simply acting as their stenographer—is like comparing apples and bricks.
- If you accept an apple for what it is and put it on the ground, chances are good an apple tree will eventually sprout and send its roots and limbs and leaves to where they should naturally be.
- If you put a brick on the ground… well, you’ve got a brick on the ground. You can keep adding more bricks, but it will never be your creation. It will always end up being whatever the directions someone else wrote say it will be: the grill or shed or whatever else that everyone else who follows the same directions end up with too.
Still, there are some redeeming features in Ms. Burrows’ articles. She presents some good basics that you can study and absorb with your conscious mind. (Learning is the conscious mind’s only legitimate role in fiction.)
If you want to compare and contrast writing advice for yourself (that’s another function of the conscious, critical mind), by all means, do that. Study is good. Learning from different sources is good.
You all have my take in several TNDJ articles on Structure and Setting and Scene and you all probably own several “how to write” books from which you can draw even more information to study and compare.
But my advice will always be, no matter what or how much you study, when you sit down to write again don’t consciously think about what you read or studied or what you learned from anybody, including me.
Instead, just open the tap or the channel or whatever it is for you, drop into your characters’ world, and race through the story with them.
Whatever you do, don’t control the events of the story and don’t control the characters’ reactions to those events. Simply observe through the physical and emotional senses of the POV character and then write what you observe.
Okay. Unless I get questions or comments or think of yet another way to say “believe in yourself” I’m through with that for awhile.
Of Interest
The Beating Heart of Your Story—Structure
How to Write Powerful Scenes that Engage Your Readers
The Mirror Is Not Your Friend A great article to get you started thinking about ways to describe the POV character.