8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: writing

  • Smouldering Plots

    It’s difficult to start a story, and it’s difficult to end a story, but there is a hump I have found that occurs shortly after you start.

    I have been writing a new novel and I am at the point where I need to move from the inciting action where all the characters are introduced and dive into the guts of the story, where all the action and the bulk of the story is going to happen.

    I did all this work on planning out a plot. I did all this work creating characters. I did all this work lighting the fire to make it all start.

    And while I did think about how the flames keep smouldering for the next couple hundred pages of real story, getting over that hump and putting it down into actual words on an actual page is turning out to be a bigger chore than I anticipated.

    If you have been reading my meandering thoughts you know that I just push through and write my five hundred words each day, and that’s practically how it goes down. But the effort, the mental churn, the fight to get it there is different now that I’ve moved into the real plot.

  • Drive-by Storytelling

    My kid, who is technically an adult studying theatre and literature at University, was chatting over the weekend about story design.

    “I don’t ever know when to start a story.” She said. “Like, do you write from the beginning or jump into the action, or—”

    Look, I’m no expert but I can tell you that such things are a combination a lot of other things: two of the big ones being personal style and confidence in the reader.

    I write my stories in a way that I usually think of as drive by storytelling.

    The reader doesn’t go to the story, listen to the whole tale, then drive away when it’s finished.

    Rather, they drive by: the story is happening and they hear a piece of it as they “drive by” and then keep going while the story keeps happening in the rearview mirror. 

    To clarify, I do focus on writing the important nuggets of the tale being told and not random, meaningless chunks.

    But by working in this model I tend to write in a way that focuses my personal style on having confidence that the reader will understand enough of what happened before they got there and enough of what will continue to go on after they pass by.