In today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* Topic: I Teach So I May Learn
* Of Interest
Quotes of the Day
“The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.” Nick Bilton
“Observers typically attribute Hoover’s success to BookTok, the segment of TikTok dedicated to authors and readers.” from “The Unlikely Author Who’s Absolutely Dominating the Bestseller List” (Slate) (See “Of Interest” for a link to the article)
“Put interesting characters in difficult situations and write to find out what happens.” Stephen King
“The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo; the job is to invent the status quo.” Seth Godin
Topic: I Teach So I May Learn
It happened again. While responding to a student, I had an epiphany. It wasn’t anything shiny and new, but it FELT shiny and new. It was a shiny new way to say something I’ve been saying since 2014.
One of my mentoring students wrote to say, almost in passing, that he sometimes has trouble discerning whether the little inside voice he’s been hearing lately is from his creative subconscious or his critical mind. (Thanks, Scott.)
I explained to him, as I learned from Dean Wesley Smith, that the critical voice is always negative, and the creative subconscious is always positive. All three examples he sent me were strongly negative. So my job was done, easy peasy.
But one of the examples he used was, “There is not enough depth at the start.”
As I told him, and as many of you can see, that statement is blatantly negative.
But that’s when I had the epiphany: Characters don’t worry about “depth,” do they?
Characters don’t worry about depth, or structure, or words, or scenes, or setting, or the five senses, or any other part of the writing craft.
Because the characters are pure. They don’t know anything about writing fiction, positive or negative. They’ve never heard all the BS writing myths that others have flung at our conscious minds all our lives. Likewise, they’ve never heard of Heinlein’s Rules or writing into the dark.
So they don’t worry about ANY of that on either side. They’re too busy dealing with what’s happening to them: their story.
In YOUR OWN story as a writer of fiction, one of two things are true: Either
▪ you’re steeped in the writing myths. You’re sitting at a keyboard, but most of the time your fingers aren’t moving because you’re suffering Myth Paralysis. It’s a silent killer, so you probably don’t even know. But you can look for the signs:
Are you hardly writing because you’re fretting over words and paragraphs and structure and whether the characters’ voices sound too similar and whether you’ve included the five senses and depth and all the rest? There you go.
OR
▪ you’ve learned to trust yourself and your characters. In that case, you’re also sitting at a keyboard, but the similarity ends there.
Your fingers are moving as fast as they’re able, and you’re looking forward with eager anticipation to what will happen next. A surprise waits around every bend in the story.
You aren’t thinking about words or paragraphs or structure or the sound or tone of the characters’ voices or including the five senses or depth or ANY of that. You don’t have time to think.
You’re too busy trying to keep up as you race through the story with your characters. You’re busy recording events as they occur, plus recording the characters’ reactions, what they do and what they say.
Understand this — When you write into the dark, you aren’t making up a story and the characters aren’t telling you a story. They’re LIVING a story and allowing you to experience it with them.
Your job is only to record what you witness: what happens, how the characters react, and what they say. In other words, your job is to have fun.
Talk with you later.
Of Interest
See “September Workshops Now Available” at https://deanwesleysmith.com/september-workshops-now-available/.
See “What is Your Character Hiding: The Power of Secrets” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/what-is-your-character-hiding-the-power-of-secrets/. Something to read/absorb with the conscious mind, but as always, trust that you’ve absorbed what you need and Just Write.
See “How to Write a Mystery in Any Genre” at https://killzoneblog.com/2022/08/how-to-write-a-mystery-in-any-genre.html. I recommend a grain of salt. Take what makes sense to you and leave the rest.
See “September Workshops Now Available” at https://deanwesleysmith.com/september-workshops-now-available/.
See “TikTok Has Changed Everything, Especially Book Publishing” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/tiktok-has-changed-everything-especially-book-publishing/. Maybe help with marketing/promotion.
See “The Unlikely Author Who’s Absolutely Dominating the Bestseller List” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/the-unlikely-author-whos-absolutely-dominating-the-bestseller-list/.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………………… 770 words
Writing of Blackwell Ops 8 (tentative title, novel)
Day 19… 2117 words. Total words to date…… 41729
Day 20… 2025 words. Total words to date…… 43754
Day 21… 1770 words. Total words to date…… 45524
Day 22… 3296 words. Total words to date…… 48820
Day 23… 3259 words. Total words to date…… 52079
Day 24… 2712 words. Total words to date…… 54791
Day 25… 1068 words. Total words to date…… 55859
Day 26… 1003 words. Total words to date…… 56862
Total fiction words for August……… 8042
Total fiction words for the year………… 60538
Total nonfiction words for August… 10200
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 116440
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 176978
Calendar Year 2022 Novels to Date…………………… 0
Calendar Year 2021 Novellas to Date……………… 0
Calendar Year 2021 Short Stories to Date… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 66
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 217
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31
Disclaimer: I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. I’ve never said WITD is “the only way” to write, nor will I ever. However, I will continue to advocate WITD both publicly and regularly, among other topics.