A Bug's Life

Lots of writing done yesterday, lots more to do today. We're going to visit Mother Clanger and Grandma Bug though, so I'm borrowing major_clanger's PDA which has a snazzy attachable keyboard so I can write in the car.

I have been mostly writing TAFF reportage and APAzines. I joined athenais's deathless_pose community as a really big challenge to myself: it's for people who are "serious about writing one short story a week". Each week there's a theme, and each week you write a story on that theme and comment on each other's stories. I started three weeks ago with the best of intentions.

Each week I sit down with a block of dedicated time, and give serious thought to the story. I think up characters, conflicts, the genre aspects. I draw diagrams of structure. I know exactly what the story is going to be like, indeed I can write the minimum 500 words about the story, pointing out where the reveals occur, what the themes are, what style I'm aiming for. This takes 2-4 hours. This is a huge achievement for me, I could never do this at school and I've not tried since. It does take hard thought for me to come up with stories, they don't magically grow inside my head until they're bursting to hatch out, as seems to be the case with some people. The last 15 years of reading and reading more critically have helped a lot. I like the stories I think up, I'd like to read them. They're idle fun rather than anything hugely meaningful, but there's always Christopher Priest for the other.

Then I sit down with a block of dedicated time, my notes and snippets and diagrams, and seriously start to write the story. And at top speed, I grind out 30 words in half an hour. It's so difficult it makes my eyeballs bleed; all the time I'm writing, I remind myself "It's writing a story in a week. It doesn't have to be great, it just has to be finished." Even so, I never know which word should come next. The gaps in my diagram become obvious. Genre writing is peculiarly difficult, I find - (not that I've written fiction of any other kind) - especially in a short story, you have to paint a universe in so few words, eliding some details for the later reveal (how crap would the cliched 'last two people on earth' story be if it started out with "Adam was the last man on Earth".) but without cheating the reader by omitting important details.

I find this so hard, and don't know why. I'll give it another try in the car today, and try to write the story in the first person. I find that a lot easier - I wondered if 60 words per hour was my composition speed, but I whacked out 1000 words of APAzine in two hours yesterday, so it can't be that.

Bah. Enough wibbling, and off to visit parental units.