Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

ON WRITING FICTION

All the time in every submission, every publisher’s read of it, and every rejection of it, and every reaction to rejection, and every thought about your reaction to rejection is a reflection of the time that you didn’t put into researching people, places, and things, that would fill your head with possibilities for novelty that would inform the reader, capture the reader’s attention, and increase the chance of publication.

All entertainment is novelty seeking. Human experience is translated in to emotion, and into memory, and into auto-association, an later contemplation by its degree of novelty.

If you aren’t teaching the reader something new about others, about life, about people, about places, about things, or asking the reader to outwit you and your characters, you’re wasting your time, the editors time, the publisher’s time and the reader’s time – if you ever manage to get one.

1. Learning the archetypes and the plots is trivial.

2. Adapting them to contemporary life takes a bit of thought.

3. Informing the reader about life takes more thought.

4. Planting clues for the reader to speculate where the plot is going takes a bit more thought.

5. Planting outwitting the reader’s speculation takes more thought.

6. Novel combinations of all the above takes much more thought.

7. More characters and more plot lines and more sets of clues takes much more thought.

8. Using all of the above to teach the audience a philosophy for the present, a state of the world in the past or future – a system of thought that reframes the world – that is what literature means.

9. Doing #8 so that you capture the essence of the age in the myths of the age: theology, fantasy, science fiction, fiction, biography, history, philosophy, law or science is extremely difficult and those that endure are extremely rare.

But in the end, answer the question every art, music, literature, play, and script professional will ask you?

1. Are you engaging in therapy?

2. Are you engaging in escapism?

3. Are you engaging in self-entertainment?

4. Are you engaging in approval-seeking?

5. Are you engaging in business or entrepreneurship?

6. Are you engaging in craftsmanship or engineering (production)?

7. Are you engaging in entertainment (novelty)?

9. Are you engaging in politics or propaganda?

9. Are you engaging in philosophy?

10. Are you engaging in art?

The amount of knowledge that you must reflect in, or incorporate in your work increases with scale.

Postmodernism is a cancer on mankind – as bad as monotheism was in the past.

But we are almost done with it.

We are in a period of chaos.

The period before the great change.

We require authors to create a new vision.

We live the vision of technology created in 1980 by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.

We live in the vision of civilization destruction created by Derrida.

We live in the literary model of GRR Martin’s Futility of heroism, where the meek inherit the devastated earth.

We live in the reverse gender model of harry (Harriet) Potter vs Hermione (Herman) Granger.

We live in the political order of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

What are you bringing to the table in exchange for others attention?

Because they couldn’t care less, nor should they, about your therapy, escapism, self-entertainment, approval seeking, entrepreneurship, and they expect at least craftsmanship and production quality in exchange for not only their (increasingly trivial) money, and (increasingly costly) attention.

I’ve taught creativity for decades and it’s trivial.

1. Fill the shelves of your mind with everything possible until you have so many ideas you can’t choose among them.

2. Sketch characters, locations, things, incentives, and obstacles.

3. Sketch plots (arcs)

That’s filling your head.

4. Write scenes with beginning middle and end.

5. Write chapters with beginning middle and end.

6. Write arcs with beginning middle and end.

7. Write stories with beginning middle and end.

The rest is editing- be merciless.

You want to feel your way through a writing book, but you can’t feel your way through emptiness. Give yourself resources to work with. Otherwise you’re just using free association to create a poor imitation of whatever authors you’ve read who did what you didn’t.