The words are rolling.
Oh, not fast enough to suit me. Never that! but a heck of a lot faster than they have been in the recent past. The short story I’ll be submitting for that anthology (positive! Think positive!) has a title now, “Fire Prevention” (which may change; who knows?) and the beginnings of a discernible structure—faint, but definite.
And I’d like to give some credit to Brandon Sanderson. Not that I’ve had the privilege of meeting the man, nor have I read his “How to Write a Good Book” tome—because he hasn’t written one. No, I’ve been slogging though the videos of his novel writing course at BYU.
Anyone who knows me face-to-face knows how much I loathe trying to learn from videos. It’s worse than having to sit through lectures. No lecture has ever gone fast enough for me, not even at MIT. No more does any video. My attitude is, “Just write it down, dude, and print your #$%^# lecture notes.” But I’ve gotten enough gems from the seven (of twelve) Sanderson lectures I’ve listened to so far that I (almost) don’t mind having to sit still for an hour and (try to) listen. At least I can rewind if (when) my ADHD kicks in. Problem is, it doesn’t go any faster on the second hearing…
But still. The most valuable stuff I’ve gotten from Sanderson’s lectures are a) what are the strong points v. the drawbacks of outlining, b) what are the strong points v. the drawbacks of “discovery writing” (AKA “pantsing”), and c) specific strategies to compensate for discovery writing weaknesses.
In case you hadn’t noticed, I am such a hard-core discovery writer that for formal technical writing I discovery-wrote and created the outline after. It’s part of the ADHD thing, I suspect, and attempts to force outlining upon my workflow have not worked to date. The dead bodies of numerous “How to Outline for Hard-Core Pantser” books litter my e-reader app, and various portions of outline anatomy likewise litter my Scrivener projects. (This is not to put down those outlining book authors. I’m sure it works for them, and seems to work for others.) Really, it doesn’t take much outline at all for my brain to start saying, “Wow, this is boring. I already wrote this story/technical paper/blog article; why do I have to write it again?”
But thanks to Sanderson’s lectures, I’m not saying that about “Fire Prevention.” I highly recommend them.
A Study In Silver 