And the following is the transcript for the talk I gave prior to reading some of my book. It turned out to be a super fun event; I live in a small town and it had a pretty good turnout. Even had some students come! I just thought that some of you might find this interesting. Please keep in mind that this was intended for a group on non-writers and especially for any students that showed up. Thanks!
I’d like to say a few words about my experiences in writing, both with this book and with the writing I have done before.
I began reading pretty young. Basically, from kindergarten on, I almost always had my nose in a book. I used to lie to my parents and say that I was afraid of the dark so that I could read by the hall light. They caught on around the time I was a teenager.
In fact, looking back, what I was really interested in was storytelling, and I sought out every way I could become engrossed in stories: books became the main way I did this, but there were comics, cartoons, movies, even video games. And, pretty much from the beginning, it wasn’t enough for me to just read or watch. I wanted to make stories to. This started with cartoons and comics – I used to draw a lot – and eventually worked to writing.
I wrote my first short story in the 6th grade, some horror story that got passed around the students of my jr. high. In high school, I really began to write and made the decision to make it more of a part of my life. This was also around the time that I began to appreciate, more and more, “serious fiction,” and, so, in my 20s, I started to try and write more serious stuff.
It was terrible.
And I don’t just mean the stories I wrote – my stories were bad – but I mean the experience of writing itself. It was agonizing. Soul-sucking. I managed a few short stories during this period, even a screenplay, but nothing worth a damn and nothing really, truly complete. Eventually, it was too hard, and I just stopped.
Fast forward to my second stint in college (after a failed first attempt), especially grad school. As an English major, I did a lot a writing, and this culminated in writing my thesis – at the time, the longest single work I had ever written and perhaps one of the more difficult things I had done up to that point in my life. But I managed to finish it, and I am rather proud of the result.
And I learned something pretty important in writing my thesis. While working on it, I realized that, more than anytime in my life, I was prepared to write. At that point, I had written hundreds of pages on varying topics for my other classes. So writing, the flow from thought to page, was easier than it had ever been. Those mental muscles had been flexed and were ready. I also, through school, had finally come to terms with my own writing process. I had found a way that worked for me to bring my ideas down onto the page. For my thesis, this process began months before I even started writing. For 2 months, I read. For another two months, I planned. And, finally, for two months, I wrote. It was difficult, and there were days when I would have preferred to slowly peel my nails back than to type another word, but I had a deadline, if I wanted to graduate, and I forced myself to trudge through regardless of my feelings. Then came two months of editing, and I was finished.
This experience taught me a few things, and one especially stands out now, comparing it back to my earlier experiences in writing. When I was younger, I depended on inspiration to write, because I thought that’s what all great artists did. Like many of us do, I had some magical view of art at the time. Of course, inspiration only lasts a moment, maybe a few a moments, and never lasted long enough to get me through the hard parts. While a moment of inspiration did start my thesis, did give me the ideas that would become the final product, it was planning and work that brought it to fruition.
So when I decided I wanted to write a novel, wanted to complete a full book, I decided to apply the lesson I had learned writing my thesis. I had an idea, but I knew that wasn’t enough. So, for about a year, I read, taking note of the things I liked and the things I didn’t like in contemporary science fiction. At the same time, I prepared myself to write by writing – I started a blog and wrote regularly about climbing, trying to grease the wheels a bit, and I also used the blog to acclimatize myself to sharing my work. Then I planned, doing exactly what I tell my students – I wrote a fairly detailed outline so that, when the time came, I could focus on the writing, not the thinking, as that had already been done. And, finally, I wrote. I didn’t have a deadline, so I gave myself an arbitrary goal: 1000 words a day until it was done. And I did just that. 70000 words later, I had a completed novel in my hands.
Of course there was the editing and all that, but the main work was done, and what I learned, what separated this experience in writing from the experiences I had when I was younger, was this: inspiration only gets you so far. In the end, it is work ethic that separates those with an idea and those with an achievement.
Submitted April 18, 2019 at 01:30AM by carloswritesscifi http://bit.ly/2KHN826
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