Some days are harder than others. The words don't flow, the page looks at you in a funny way, your story's two-children-short of a gingerbread house and the last thing you want to be doing is sitting down to berate yourself over the next sentence. So, some simple tricks:

WrittenKitten - you write in the text box. Every hundred words (or whatever interval you set) the image box beside it presents you with a new kitten. The work isn't saved, so make sure you copy-paste anything you want to keep into a file on your computer, and your distraction-to-motivation ratio may vary (I personally found myself adding random words just to get the next kitten, instead of writing) but hey - it's adorable.

WriteOrDie - a tool that prompts you to keep writing with anything from gentle reminders to deleting the words you just wrote as incentive. Since I last mentioned them, they've developed desktop and iPad versions of their original web-app. $10 for the desktop app which, when you consider it's a couple of coffees, could be worth it if that kind of thing works for you.

A more low-tech version is to consider paying yourself to write. But - and here's the important part - you don't get the money until the work is finished - when it's being sent out. Not when it's published - that's not in your control unless you self-pub. But if you're using traditional markets, then you can consider something 'finished' when you've sent it out.

Work out a method that makes sense to you - pay yourself by the hour, if you tend to do a lot of 'behind the scenes' work that doesn't involve actual words going on a page (but 'waffling' does not count as work. And deep down, you know the difference.) Or you could pay yourself by words, or by page, or by scene or chapter. You'll need to estimate how much you'll end up paying yourself in total, and how much you can afford. And remember to actually put the money aside as you earn it - otherwise it's too tempting to reduce your reward later when you feel you can't afford all that in one hit.

Record how much you've "earned" each session and put it aside somewhere. A sock or drawer if you're using actual money, or earmark a certain amount in your bank account. Watch it slowly grow as you keep working on the story. When you've sent out the story, you can have the money - spend it on something that will make you feel rewarded, not something that you'd spend money on anyway. You earned that money, your reward is the ability to do whatever you want with it, guilt-free.

You can use other things than money, too - time, for instance. Maybe over the course of a novel, you earn a nice weekend vacation somewhere. Or time doing an activity that you enjoy, but normally gets left out because you have "more important things" to do. Whatever works for you as a reward; break it down into small increments somehow, and slowly 'earn' them by working.

 

I can’t for the life of me keep to a schedule. Oh, I can get to work on time and keep appointments and for the most part go to bed at a sensible hour, because Evening-Sofie has finally figured out that if she makes Morning-Sofie sleepy, that sleepiness is passed on though Afternoon-Sofie, and nobody has any fun. But as for internal schedules - schedules for stuff that nobody else cares about (except of course if it doesn’t get done at all) - I’ll happily make them, but they’re a guilt-edged (hah) invitation to Do Something Else. 

Write? I need to do some programming, now. Finish editing that draft? I haven’t finished putting the washing on. It came to my attention mostly when I realised it was well past time that I was cooking dinner, and yet I was emailing my mother (I call these queries ‘Moogling’) to ask her advice on how to better keep to a schedule.

 I thought I was good at scheduling. I managed my Honours degree while working part time and with almost a month spare for polishing the thesis. I completed two masters degrees at the same time while working three jobs. But those were all based on external deadlines. They had a logical order, and due dates carved in stone, and the left side of my brain has learned how to manage those effortlessly. 

The left side of my brain is a scheduling-nazi. It likes everything to be planned out so it knows what I’ll be doing and when, how much time I can expect to spend on a project, when a project will be finished or ready for the next stage, what else I can fit in. It gets very upset when other people ride roughshod over that with invitations to go be social somewhere. It gets stressed when things on today’s To Do list aren’t done. 

The right side of my brain hates those schedules. Especially if they have times attached to them - write from 6pm to 8pm - but I don’t feel like it right now. I’d rather work on this. Get this list of 5 things done - okay, we’ll do some of those, but surely some of them can wait until tomorrow, or next week even. 

It's usually my left brain that thinks about scheduling and organising. And it can't understand what the problem is - why is it so hard? Surely I'm just being lazy, just put the butt in the chair and do the work. It sees it as a discipline problem, but I'm not so sure of that.

I still get things done. And anything with an external deadline - go to work, go to sleep, get these critiques done - will be completed on time. But my right brain is resisting any attempts to plan or schedule when my creative projects will be worked on, and which one gets worked on when 

I’m still looking for a solution, here. Some way to convince my right brain to work with some kind of predictability. But as they say, the first step is always recognising there’s a problem, and my problem is the part of my brain that does all the creative stuff has no interest in doing so on demand. I’ll keep you posted if I find some solutions.

 

Something to think about - especially with the current self-pub/traditional question. Originally posted by Kristan Hoffman, who adapted it from Charles Schultz. However, her site seems to be reading her bandwidth cap pretty regularly, so I'll repost here (but hers has pretty pictures, and other interesting posts you should check out):

There are two “quizzes”. Scroll slowly and read carefully to get the full effect. It’s okay if you don’t know all the answers, just keep going.

Who are the 3 wealthiest writers in the world? Who are the last 3 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature? Who are the last 3 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? What are 5 of the “Top 10 Best Books” of last year? What’s the latest book on shelves that was signed for a 7-figure deal?

 The rest, for maximum effect, is hidden behind the Read More function...

I was all geared up to do Nano this year - of sorts. I was going to write a novel, but it probably wasn’t going to be 50,000 words. I didn’t know how many words it was going to be, and I wasn’t going to track it. Because that number, when you come down to it, is a nonsense way of judging whether you’re “done” yet.

I read this post by Jason Black on Plot to Punctuation who gave a great argument against using word count as a daily goal. The little number at the bottom of the screen (or wherever) takes far more of your focus than the words you’re churning out to increase it, and tempts you to stop when you’re on a roll, just because you’ve reached today’s number, or keep pushing when all you’re doing is padding or waffling because you still have another 200 words to go.

I find when I give myself wordcount goals, that rapidly becomes the case. And because my first drafts of anything tend to be absolute-bare-bones, super-condensed story, I fight the urge to pad out my story when the wordcount’s a little low despite my being halfway through already.

When you consider that, especially for self-publishing, story-length really doesn’t even matter anymore, it seems fairly idiotic for me to focus so much on wordcount when it hinders me in so many ways. 

Black has a great solution that I really wish I’d thought of earlier. He’s ignoring wordcount, and focussing instead on scenes.

It makes so much sense. Instead of having some fairly arbitrary counter distracting you, you judge your progress by how much of the story you’ve completed. You know instinctively how far through the scene you are. Scenes invite you to finish them, it’s a much more natural, unobtrusive goal. You’re not tracking a number while you write, you’re just writing this scene.

Scenes in my novels range from 2000 to 5000 words. I can write a scene - or most of one, if it’s a long one - in a day’s writing, before and after work. And serendipitously enough, my novel broke down into exactly thirty scenes. So my great plan was: one scene a day (accepting that they’d be bare-bones scenes. I go back on a second pass and fill in the description and detail and everything else before I consider the draft ‘finished’).

I was due back from Paris the morning of the 1st (oh, yeah, I went to Paris. Again. Did I mention that? Pics in later posts. Luxembourg is beautiful.). That gave me, somewhat optimistically, a full day to write a scene. Allowing for jetlag, I still had several full free days before I had to go back to work. If I missed the first day, I could make up for it later.

I didn’t account for Qantas. I didn’t account for a three-hour delay on the euro-star. I didn’t account for jetlag to be coupled with illness, sunburn and my fridge breaking down, so that my brain was too scattered to even think about story until possibly last night. Well, Friday night. Because I write these in advance. Sorry.

So, a week late, I could still start and make the ‘spirit’ of Nano. I looked at my story-plot, all neat and organised in Scrivener. Then I realised that, while I’d plotted out my story, I’d skimped on the worldbuilding. Again.

Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that spending time ‘worldbuilding’ outside of actually writing the novel or just daydreaming was a form of procrastination. Actually writing down the story bible was procrastination, and should be avoided.

Now, this is nonsense - I’ve even written about how important your story bible is, especially for series. But there was a little opinion in my head telling me I should just be writing the novel, not wasting time faffing about the edges making decisions on what plant to include near the desert. I’m a very impatient person, and I wanted the book done now now now. I wanted to be selling it already, and moving onto the next ones. I have way too many ideas, and not enough brains to channel them.

But there are no shortcuts, here. So - no Nano for me this year, not even to try out my snazzy new notion (though I will be trying it, once my planning’s done. Just not in Nano.). But for anyone else who tends to write their first drafts in ‘story shorthand’ - try aiming for scenes instead of numbers, and see how well those goals work for you.

 

 

Take a fairytale, myth or story you know well. Alice in Wonderland, Prometheus, Cinderella, etc.

Take a genre/setting you've never written about. Cyberpunk. Steampunk. Space Opera. Bromance. Western. You can see where this is going. Preferably, pick something that is as unlike the story you've chosen as possible, because it'll force you to be creative instead of filling in the blanks.

You guessed it - write tab A in slot B. Hopefully, if they're different enough, having to fit the story into the genre/setting rules will mean things have to change - it stops being cinderella and turns into a story with cinderella-esque themes or tropes. 

Have fun.

 

Okay, this was news a while ago, but it's been sitting in my inbox while I decided what to do with it: through the magic of Amazon's kindle app store, Zork and other interactive fiction games are coming / have arrived on the kindle.

If you're wiggling your eyebrows at the term 'interactive fiction', think "choose your own adventure" on steroids. There's an explanation at the link, but it's essentially a story-based adventure game on computer, but it uses text only - paragraphed descriptions of everything you can look at, touch or otherwise interact with.  You type in commands like "go north", "take keys", "hit troll" "pick lock with straw" and the game responds accordingly. 

They've been quietly developing alongside more conventional computer games, developing quite sophisticated tools for construction of stories and worlds, and even their own annual competitions, and while the learning curve for producing them isn't gentle, it's certainly a fascinating idea to start blending the line between "book" and "game" so thoroughly on the kindle.

 

Find a long piece of music or an album, preferably instrumentalist. Ideally, it has highs and lows - parts where the music is upbeat, parts where it's dark, sections of tension, melancholia, light relief. Classical music works well as do movie soundtracks (if you skip out any pop songs), or (my personal favourites) albums by Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre or Enigma.

Sit down, put the album on, and start writing whatever scene the music makes you think of. A tense, underworld exploration? A happy couple? A chaotic storm of dreams? Go with the music, shifting the tone and pace of the story to match as you listen.

If you're someone who types slowly, you may find you have only time for a sentence or two before the tone changes - that's okay. Treat it as an outline exercise, in that case - you can flesh out the sentence into a paragraph or so later.

 

Music often makes stories in my head. Pop music less so; the lyrics are too distracting, and the melody often too repetitive and (dare we say it) not particularly evocative. Which isn't to say I don't like pop, just that I rarely find it inspirational.

Instrumental works, however often inspire a world of stories in my head based on whatever I happened to be thinking about before they came on. I'm particularly partial to the works of Vangelis, Enigma, Jean Michel Jarre and the instrumental works of the Alan Parsons Project for these purposes. Not all that surprising, I guess: those were the artist my father used to blast through the house from his massive stereo system when I was growing up. I have to be careful what I listen to at my techwriting job, lest I get lost imagining some story with the music instead of getting my work done.

I find this can be useful when faced with a scene that I'm either finding difficult, or not really in the mood for -  writing a frantic escape scene when I'm absolutely knackered, or aloving reunion scene when I'm feeling curmudgeonly. They're also great defence against distractions - external or internal - that want to tear me from my precious writing time. Just put the music on, set my fingers on the keyboard, and forget about the world outside my little bubble.

 I'm in the process of setting up "writing mood playlists" for different types of scenes, filtering through the Gigs of music to find the songs that inspire this or that particular emotion. If you haven't tried writing to a soundtrack, I suggest you give it a go - though it takes some prep work to get it right. Make sure the songs you choose are ones that won't distract you from the writing or push you towards an emotion that doesn't work in the scene. Make sure the music goes for longer than you're planning to write - the sudden silence is very disconcerting if you run out of music partway.

 

This is a challenge akin to writing something that (might) work for a game story - it's shifting the character arcs onto the supporting characters, the characters who aren't the story focal point (protagonist).

Take three characters (you can use more, but it's harder).  One of these is the protagonist, the one making their own life, telling the story. Give them a goal.

The other two characters may help or hinder (they can do either, but if they're both helping or both hindering, they should do it in different ways). They also each have individual goals. These goals don't particularly mesh with your protagonist's, and they directly contradict each other.

Example: C is your protagonist. She's locked in a building and wants to get out (goal). G currently controls the building, and wants C to stay there to perform a task (goal). W starts out helping C because he (secretly) wants control of the building (goal).

Now, the trick is to create character arcs for G and W. Have them go through dramatic changes emotionally and as a person - think Hero's journey, though it doesn't have to be anything grand. So, create an emotional arc for G and another for W. Now you have to work out how to get there through C's actions. C is still the protagonist. It's just that C's actions are causing emotional arcs in other people. Remember The Hollywood Formula? - well, one of G and W is the hero, one is the antagonist. C (the actual protagonist) is the relationship character.

Now, either W or G has to be the 'hero' - this is the person that C will have a reconciliation with. In our example above, W is only using C to help him achieve his goal of taking over the building. Once he's done this, he betrays C and uses her in the same manner G was earlier. Near the end, however, W realises his mistake and apologises to C - they reconcile. So that makes W the hero, and G the antagonist.

You have your three goals, and your two arcs (your protagonist doesn't get an arc, they may or may not achieve their goal.). The arcs are a direct result of the protagonists actions and interactions with the characters. Now write the story.

 

A while ago I was downloading the remaining sondtrack for Portal 2, a game that's still on my list for game of the year. (The fact that I actually wanted the soundtrack to a game should tell you something of the production values and creativity of the team involved). I thought about the story, trying to determine what made it so much better than the typical video game fare. This was shortly after I'd listened to Writing Excuses' podcast on the Hollywood Formula, and approaching the issue from this angle showed something interesting

I should note that if you haven't already played Portal or Portal 2, this post assumes you know how the story goes, and there are major plot spoilers ahead. I'd strongly suggest that if you have any intention of playing it (and you should), play it before reading any further. It's well worth it, and one of the few games where experiencing the story is a vital component to the game.

 

    Okay, after last week's rant about archetypal characters, how can we make them useful? Primarily by understanding what they're for.

They're placeholders - they describe a character's likely function within a plot. They give hints of characteristics, a springboard of ideas or traits to further develop. In other words, they're a starting point. But they shouldn't be the endpoint, too.

So, writing game: Create a character by blending two otherwise unrelated archetypes. Eg The Mentor and the Whore. The Artist and the Mesiah.The Protector and Betrayer. You don't have to use all aspects of both archetypes, just pick some that sound interesting to you, and contradict each other at least a little. (If you're struggling to think of archetypes, I recommend reading either Campbell's The Hero Has One Thousand Faces, or Victoria Lynn Schmidt's  45 Master Characters.)

Don't worry about giving your character personality yet - that's partially what this exercise is for. At the moment, all you should have is a list of contradictory traits. And a name - give them a name.

Now, put them in a situation where none of their traits are applicable. They have no advantages here. No knowledge, no experience, their go-to solution not only won't work, there's nowhere to start. Totally out of their depth. See what they do. Chances are, you'll start to build actual personality.

 

 

Think of the most trivial need you can. Someone wants a bucket of sand. A packet of chips. A left shoe. Something utterly mundane and petty.

Your task is now to write the scenario where that need is world-ending. They'd give everything they had for that shoe. And you have to show why. Why is that shoe suddenly so crucial? What terrible fate will befall without the protection of that packet of chips? What will they lose, for want of a bucket?

Go for comedy if you like - depending on the need you decided, there may be simply no way to suspend disbelief without absurdity. But make sure you communicate real need for this item, with real stakes.

 

No writing games this week - too frantic preparing for Paris. But I do have two great posts for you (okay, one's a podcast, but it's still a "post".)

One - on your author-voice(s) and your character's voice(s): what they are, how to find it (or cheat at it, if you're struggling), how to know you've got one, and how to protect it once you have one.

Two - a podcast on "the Hollywood Formula" over at Writing Excuses (a great running series about all manner of writing, especially spec. fic). Don't cring at the word "formula", this is actually a great breakdown of how the major emotional arc works between characters in a story, and it's a great tool for getting to the crux of creating an emotionally satisfying arc.

 

I had a post. It turned into a rant. Joomla then ate it, which is probably for the best. Must as I'm annoyed. But foremost: Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a great post about fear, and how it makes writers make terrible mistakes, like signing awful contracts. You should go read. I'll wait.

Second, there's a new publishing business in town called PubSlush, which promise wonderful things. They're basically Kickstarter for books - if enough people pledge to buy your book, PubSlush gives you a bonus and publishes it. But they're asking for a lot more than they're giving, and they're telling you even less - see the Writer's Beware posts on them. You hand a lot of stuff over to PubSlush just by submitting a book

Personally, I think you're better off staying in control of your own business. They're not doing anything you can't do yourself without a little learning and work. 

And that was really the point of my rant: that writing is a business, and it always has been. And business really isn't that hard. People running hotdog stands can manage it. The best part about this business is, it's not high finance. There aren't millions at stake. If you make a mistake, you can almost always correct it, and if you can't - you can learn for the next book. Fear of something being too hard to learn or do is just procrastination wearing a silly hat. 

 

I've always found Campbell's Hero has One Thousand Faces somewhat inaccessible. The information's buried so far down in metaphor that I found it very difficult to apply, as a novelist. And Vogler's Hero's Journey's not much better. I did, however, come across this piece online the other day, which explores the same material but makes it somehow more digestable. It's a lengthy read, but worth it, if you're looking at story structure and character arcs and trying to make sense of your gut feelings about things.

The writing game's pretty simple, really. Take a story, either one that you've written, or a book you've read recently, and find the points of the journey, if you can. Now, not all stories follow the journey (though they can usually be shoehorned in if you try hard enough, just as any literature student). The point is to get practise at seeing the structures so you can internalise them.

 

On Friday I went to the opening of an interesting gallery exhibition. Titled 'Off the Wall', it's a showcase of prose and poems from writers at the Waverley Community Learning Centre, and corresponding artworks created by artists inspired by the pieces.

There were some fantastic pieces on display, both written and visual - a perfect demonstration of the myriad results you'll gain from asking disparate people to create art from a central idea. Some artists created a representation of the imagery already present within a story or poem, others went for metaphor or even further abstractions. Some were realist, surrealist, post-modern or aesthetic, some in paint, some glass, textile or thre-dimensional.

When we, as writers, concentrate so much on ensuring a reader an visualise our worlds and stories, it's a fascinating glimpse into the alternate possibilities presented by a more "direct" medium for such a thing.

I wonder what we'd create if we cycled the process once again - if writers took inspiration from the artist's creations, created new stories and poems?

THe exhibit's on until October 6th at the Highway Gallery - highly recommended.

 

I've been trying to learn French recently. Well, more accurately, I've been trying to cram French recently - I have a trip to Paris coming up, which I've known about since March, and in fact even had the French-learning software since March, but being a writer it was absolutely necessary to procrastinate until weeks before I'm due to leave, despite my promise to myself that the next time I went to France I'd make sure I could speak the language. And even, oddly enough, despite the fact that I actually enjoy learning languages. Writer's logic.

I'm using Rosatte stone, which is great for learning nouns and verbs and adjectives like colour and number, but absolutely terrible for the more subtle nuances of language like pronouns, abstract verbs (or abstract anything), grammar, possessives, and anything other than vocab, really. You're shown a picture of a girl holding a pen, and given a phrase. You repeat the phrase. You can even match the phrase to the picture later on,or similar pictures, based on your ability to recognise the word 'girl' and 'pen', but you have no way of knowing what it was that phrase actually says. A girl and a pen? The girl's pen? A girl with a pen? A girl has a pen? The girl likes her pen? No idea. It's down to how you've interpreted the image. They then try to build on this complete absence of understanding, and you end up with an extremely superficial grasp of the language. I spent an entire chapter lesson thinking they were trying to teach me present and past tense, when in fact they were teaching negative nouns.

I've taken to having Google Translate open on the other screen. New phrases are typed in, I see what they're trying to teach me, and we go from there. This pretty much violates their notion of "natural language learning", where you learn by being immersed in the language - it's never translated back to your native tongue, you work purely in the learned language. But static images really can't convey abstract concepts like possession vs use vs proximity, and these concepts are crucial to language.

I don't know if I really have a point here, other than that I think it's fascinating just how complex our communication has become. We have concepts that cannot be reliably expressed in any other form. And yet, there still exist languages that have no number words, or no pronouns, or no measurement of time, distance or count - because the people using that language have never needed it. There's a school of thought that language controls our thinking, because thoughts need to be expressed in words. I find that a flimsy argument in some respects - it certainly is possible to think without words, and the connections between ideas are far faster and more efficient when you don't slow them down to force them into language. But there is the notion that as a culture, there are entire notions that are left behind if they're not catered for by your language.

I've run into the issue once or twice. At times, when I've been utterly exhausted or running a dangerous fever, I've had episodes where I have woken and my brain's reality check had gone for lunch. My theory is that some sections of my brain were still "alseep", and I had no idea what was real, what was out of memory or imagination. I couldn't remember my name, my life, or even that it was impossible for there to be a spaceship outside my bedroom door and the toasters to be having a revolution and siding with the vampires. The notion of 'me' was entirely gone, I was just a floating experience, scrambling to make sense of things with absolutely no compass for what was possible and what wasn't.

It is extroadinarily difficult to communicate this notion of depersonalisation using a tool that assumes the speaker has some form of identity. I say "I felt" but there was no 'me'. There was a focus of experience, but no personality inside. I couldn't remember what it felt like to be me - I couldn't even remember that I was supposed to be able to feel that way. Like a blank slate, but a slate that still cares for its own existence, and is resolute that no damn toaster is going to feed it to a vampire, spaceship or none. We can't rationally discuss entities that experience this. Just like those Amazon tribes can't discuss how many animals they hunted, or how old they are, or where they were last winter.

Perhaps that's one of the points of science fiction - to find the concepts that we haven't needed to talk about yet, so we can stretch our language to fit them.

 

I had a post, but Joomla decided to eat it, as it does every so often. And rewriting posts always strikes me like I'm repeating myself, I get impatient and stroppy. More than usual, I mean. I can't believe there's no "undo" function on the internet. But here goes.

The rundown is: I've been tweaking the plot of my novel for months, trying to get it to work. It kept feeling contrived and forced. Sometimes those 'tweaks' seemed to be major revisions, as in they'd require substantial rewriting of a lot of scenes. But I realised the other day, while thinking about le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, that I'd missed something major.

I wrote a while ago about keeping one thing sacred in your novel, and everything else being mutable. I'd forgotten that. There were aspects of my plot that I wrote in months ago as filler - they were "Until I think of something better" stand-ins. Trouble was, when I redesigned the story again and again, they hung on, until they'd worked their way into the central conceit. And I could no longer see that they didn't need to be there at all.

They were lame. They didn't work. And I couldn't make them work, because the novel didn't need to be 'tweaked'. It needed for me to burn the plot down to the ground and start again.

So I did. I threw out those aspects of the plot with a certain amount of glee. I thought about what it was about Earthsea that worked for me so much as a novel, and while i was looking and the shredded remains of my plot ideas, I saw it - the emotional centre of the novel. It felt right.

I still don't have much of a plotline. There are some major gaps and holes and things to wrangle out. But I feel like now I have the heart of what this story is.

It can be hard to see the rules we make for ourselves of what our stories are about. They turn into assumptions, like gravity and oxygene - invisible. We just walk on the ground and breathe air and don't even think about it. But they can kill a novel, if you don't look out for them.

 

I wrote a while ago about a certain kind of cleverness that pervades literature, especially literature written by graduates of creative writing courses who've been taught that technical skill is all you need. Essentially, it's the written form of mooning people out of a Boeing 747 window - flashy but pointless, and ultimately still just made of butt cheeks.

There's another kind of cleverness that's perhaps more accidental, and if there's a writer who isn't guilty of it at one time or another, I'll eat my hat. And it's not so bad - it's certainly not the mark of a horrible habit you have to unlearn, like literary cleverness. It's perhaps even merely a byproduct of overenthusiasm - eating cookie dough instead of baking cookies. But it ploughs straight through any hope for a good story. It's more obvious in science fiction and fantasy, though it happens across the genres. The writer starts with a brilliant flash of 'what if...' and they scurry away to write their story.

The problem comes when they didn't think beyond the what-if. The story exists purely to communicate their nifty idea (or, depending on the genre: their angst, revenge, wish fulfillment or fantasy) without exploring it further to develop a point. They haven't written a story, they've written a nifty idea as an anecdote. All writers are guilty of this at some point. It takes time and practise to internalise the bones of how stories work, and until you have that down you're liable to forget bits, just as when you're learning anything else.

I have a short story that I wrote as a teen, and then rewrote and reattempted several times and finally banished to the filing cabinet. I was entranced by a documentary I saw of people in comas dreaming symbolically of their illness, an illness that they could not consciously be aware of. A woman who was made comatose and quadraplegic by a car accident dreamed of a hall of statues. She awoke to find herself unable to move, and her psych-docs theorised that the dreams had been her brain processing and preparing itself for the change. I found the concept that the brain could interpret, understand and process information about such injuries without conscious input fascinating. I wrote a story about someone finding themselves in a strange world, finding things that were disturbing, and wanting to correct them, only to find when they awoke they'd corrupted the operations and procedures that had been meant to save them.

The story never worked. It never really connected with people, it was always missing something. Because the idea is only half the story.

All I was writing was "isn't this cool". And hey, it is cool. But you have to have more than that to say. Take it a step - a few steps - further. What does it mean? What is the point? What are you trying to say?

Not all stories have to have a deep, philosphical statement about life that will change people's world views. But they have to have a heart. An emotional centre. Something people take away from the story. It doesn't have to be big. I have a story at the moment where the reader is just left with an understanding of the protagonist's point of dispair and self-destructive decision. That's not a big statement to make at all. But it serves to shift the story's focus away from "here is my nifty idea" to "here is what it means".

So - if you have a story that isn't quite working, sit down and try to see if it's because you haven't quite worked out the heart of it.

 

This weekend I cooked my first steak in my new place. Just as I was about to take the steak from the pan, the smoke alarms in the kitchen and the two rooms adjoining the kitchen sounded off. Mad scramble between preserving dinner and preserving eardrums aside (man those things are loud), I was rather taken by the idea of an earsplitting alarm to tell you that your steak is done.

So, the writing exercise: your own version of a steak alarm - take an everyday invention (like the smoke alarm) and twist it sideways. You can make it as useful or comical as you like. Now write a story utilising your invention.

One step further - what are the farreaching implications of your invention? For example, if earsplitting alarms are used to notify people of dinner, how would we communicate more important information, such as (for example) your house is on fire?