So, I haven't even come close to my writing goals this year. But tax season is done, I've got two courses left to finish my degree, and I'm over losing the last book that I was working on to a missing flash drive. I forgot about the back-up rule, so I'm paying for it. Oh, well. Life goes on.
Now, it's time to buckle down and get back to what I really love to do. There's just something about writing that feels totally amazing. It's that creativity, the knowledge that you're coming as close as we can to what God did in six days. Sure, it takes longer to write a book (although if I really pushed it, I could match that time frame), but the idea is the same. The writer is creating a whole new world, maybe not a gigantic, universe-spanning world, but a world nonetheless. And when it comes together, it's a great feeling.
I read a blog post from a site that I respect that talked about outlining a book. He stated that even writers who just fly by the seat of their pants need to outline at some point. I can see the argument, but I have to disagree with the idea that if you don't outline, your book won't be very good. The closest I would want to get to 'outlining' a book is to use a formula, the kind that has been successful for hundreds of writers from the pulps. The basic beats are the same in many of these writers' books, but it's how they present them that makes the books special. Lester Dent even wrote an article on how to write a 6000-word story using a consistent formula. It can be found here; it's a very useful and interesting article. Mind you, for me, 6,000 words is a really short story; I prefer longer types. Even my short stories tend to be closer to 10,000 words. But that's just my style.
But as for outlining, I've tried it before. And the thing I learned about doing outlines is that it takes away the creativity of actually writing the book. Now, for my books, Final Exam and The Chronicles of Meterra: Arrival, those did have a rough outline, the first because I started writing it back when I was about twenty, and the second because it was based on a gaming project I was working on, and I had specific points I wanted to get in there. But even then, the outline was only in my head, and it wasn't fixed in stone.
In the Beginning has an outline, too; it's the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, from the Bible. There wasn't a lot of room to modify the plot there.
The rest of my books, though, were written on the fly, or 'into the dark,' as Dean Wesley Smith puts it. The best example of that was The Missing Magnate. I was inspired to write that the day I sold my first copy of Final Exam; one of the girls I worked with found out I had published it, and immediately grabbed her phone and ordered it in front of me. That was an indescribably awesome feeling, and I sat back down at my desk, and in between calls I started another book starring Bill and Cameron. I had no idea what was going to happen; I had no plot in mind, I had no concept of any kind. I literally just wrote the first thing that came to me: "So, you have an office now", and just went from there. I finished it in eleven days, no rewriting. The only change I made was to add another chapter in the middle to give more screen time to one of the suspects; otherwise, it was one draft, clean and ready to go. I just sent it off to my first reader (Hi, Mom!) and cleaned up a few typos and mistakes, and put it up on Amazon.
That's how the great masters did it back in the day (minus the Amazon part), and that's how others are doing it today. It's a fun way to write, and it's incredible to just let your subconscious, creative mind loose and see what it comes up with. Is it always perfect? No; I've scrapped a couple of books because they ended up being way over the top or just didn't work. But I've got seven books that were written on the fly, which is a pretty good ratio.
Anyway, that's enough of this rambling; this doesn't count as writing. It's time to get to work, so I'll sign off and see what my brain has in mind.
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