I’m in a deep ebb for writing fiction. A few things at play… I had to “trunk” Crystal Grove. Nothing could save the story even after countless hours of writing and revising. I love the characters and certain scenes, but my “go back and add shit here and there” approach failed. It reads like 3 different people with 3 different ideas wrote the damn thing. As a last ditch effort, I tried to send it to Reedsy editors for an evaluation and suggestions… no one accepted the assignment. The last section is much stronger than the first two and might stand on its own. Or, the viewpoint of a secondary character could make for a stand-alone story… but for now, it’s trunked. Dead.

Trunking CG sapped my enthusiasm. I have two stories out to publishers; they’ve been in the can for over six months. I quite like “Wasted Crisis” and it should find a home. The process is so frustrating, with months and months of waiting and then a form email rejecting the piece. And the builds on other frustrations about where are the right places to submit to and to target… few journals look for realistic, non-emotional short fiction. It’s hard to picture the right places for the work to live.

Compounding the issue is my lack of a WIP. I wrote a few brief stories a few weeks ago, one featuring a security officer in post-secession West Palm Beach and a better one about wizards in post-industrial New Jersey. They get to join the backlog of stories that need editing and work, along with Mags Hotel, two leprechaun stories, The Valley and a smattering of other tales. As I’ve written about before, my struggle with resistance is around editing, not writing. Happy to write all day, but revising…

I’ve spent my morning writing sessions with a deck of prompts from Writing Down the Bones. They are brilliant and useful questions. The prompts promote writing with genuine emotion and truth. I certainly can use more of this and the prompts are useful… but I can’t write to them every day. And I’m on my second week of nothing but prompts. I should only use them as filler or when I’m in-between work, not as a month-long assignment.

The last piece of my ennui pie is the work required to start my next piece. I’m going back to Unfair Advantage. After visiting West Palm for the first time in over two years, I found the shell of the second and final part to UA. But, in one of my lessons learned from CG and other work, I’m not writing anything until I have an outline and the conclusion worked out. Fully. By fully, I mean no parts that I can’t explain fully to myself. And pass the sniff tests in terms of interest and rising tension and all the other basic components of writing that I chose to only loosely follow until now. I’ll outline differently than previously… I didn’t like the very formulaic spreadsheet outline with fifteen column headers. I will try the James Paterson approach (ignoring the negativity around his writing… that claim may make the case for following his outlines stronger, not weaker) or writing the outline out per scene/chapter, but in paragraph form. And keep asking myself “and then what happens…” and keep throwing obstacles at Eileen. Would love to bounce ideas off of someone with experience in story writing… but I haven’t cultivated that community yet. And not having the plot points stops me from outlining, which blocks the writing.

I started writing (and this website) with modest goals. Set up a writing routine. Get published, somewhere, anywhere. Have at least one-hundred people read my stories. Work on the craft, become a better writer. Consistently publish on this website.

Over the last one-plus year, I checked off those boxes. Quality is difficult to measure, but I definitely have routine, had 2 pieces published (one in a paper journal… impossible to know how many people read finished The Inspector’s Legacy, but we’ll take the check mark), publish 2-3x/month to this site, and worked on drills, classes, prompts and feedback to improve my writing.

Time to reset. The number one goal is to publish more. I’ve come close to having work published, but this ain’t horseshoes. Writing a few thousand words per week is pleasant… having real, consistent feedback and readers is better. Publishing 2-3 short stories per year is the number one goal.

The second goal is to self-publish a novella. I’ve mentioned Crystal Grove for months, and is still a work in progress. But I’d like to go through the work of self-publishing, promoting, etc. It’s a weird story, and I’m not sure I’d start it again now, but it needs to get out there and off my plate.

The previous goals are concrete and measurable. The next few are grayer. I want to pick a few genres/areas and try to get notably better in the space. Better define who I am as a writer, establish the range of places I can publish, understand what those audiences expect, etc. And this goal supports the publishing target as well.

Another goal is better relationships with editors. Both types; the developmental and line editors needed to whip a story into place, and the gatekeepers at journals. To date, I’ve used editors at Reedsy. Their feedback is good, but only for the story itself, not for a larger view of my work.

I hope these new targets build a foundation for the final, longer-term goal. To build a practice and give meaning to a post-working-stiff life.

I just finished This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Highly recommended, an incredibly unique story and book, and I suggest going into the story completely blind (don’t read any reviews or plot summaries. Note, this is neither). At the end of the story, the two authors exchange acknowledgements.*

The people who played a role (and if the kind words are to be taken at face value, large roles) stunned me. The book is two-hundred pages long with generous fonts and margins; it could easily be condensed by fifty pages. A short book. Not only are there two authors, but friends and family who provided advice and support, agents and editors, subject matter experts, language geeks, managing editors, copyeditors, stylists, publicists… wow.

This is very different than the lone author, Hemingway hunched over his typewriter in Key West, a solitary man banging out masterpieces. It seems the co-authors worked together in a gazebo and threw around ideas. Probably agreed on an outline and beats together. I don’t have any information on the mechanics of their partnership, but I can see the advantages to working together. Better ideas. Instant reaction, excitement around concepts. And, assumedly, external validation from the team listed above. Amazing to get feedback on an idea, a concept, a scene, a character arc before writing. It hadn’t occurred to me authors could get that sort of information BEFORE putting words on the page.

Reminds me of what I’ve learned about Koppelman and Levien, via Koppelman’s podcast. They will work on story arcs and outlines together, with all of the validation and excitement inherent in sharing a vision. I don’t know much about writing for screenplay’s, but assumedly the studio signs off on an idea or concept in advance… another form of validation. Do these check’s and balances remove doubt while writing? The voice that says the plot is dull, the characters weak, the pacing off, the whole concept isn’t worthwhile? It seems freeing.

I’ve written before about the need for feedback loops and editors, or at least trusted readers. Their value looking at a first draft is obvious… but getting feedback even earlier blows my mind. I’m waiting until I feel like Crystal Grove is readable before showing it to anyone; minor plot points are in flux and lacking quality. But what if there are major flaws, or poor assumptions, or the idea just stinks? This changes my view on when to share work and how collaborative some art really is.

• reading acknowledgements and thank-you’s as well as author’s introductions is a new habit. Neil Gamian’s notes are so interesting in his short story collection and any additional color or context from the author is fascinating.

I’m on the road, visiting friends in Portland, Oregon. We had wine last night at Muse Wine Bar. While enjoying a Ploussard, a mixed group of runners assembled outside the nearby Portland Running Club. The runners, dressed to work out, greeted each other, stretched, laughed, took a group picture, started together, and came back in small and medium-sized groups forty-five minutes later. More stretching, circles of sweaty people chatting, having beers, talking about the run, the weather, whatever.

I’ve been a runner my entire adult life but never joined a running group, mainly because of living in the suburbs and my early morning running preference. I could see the camaraderie forged through shared experience. Initially, I was jealous that I wasn’t part of a similar group, and upset that I hadn’t been able to run for 3 months because of a mysterious groin injury. But it made me think how these runners found their tribe, and how I need to find mine.

When I started doing triathlons, everything I knew about training for tri’s came from Triathlon Training and slowtwitch.com. At a race at the end of my second season, a guy from the newly formed Jersey Shore Triathlon Club noticed my running times and said I should train with the club over the winter. I joined and began to mountain bike in Allaire park with serious recreational athletes. On my first ride, I struggled to keep up and fell a dozen times and was the last person in the group… but we talked shop at every break, made plans for more training later in the week, discussed gear and cross-training ideas. I called my wife from the parking lot and excitedly told her I had found my people.

The Portland running group reminded me of that feeling, of belonging to a tribe of peers. It elevated me as a triathlete, made me faster, confident and more invested in the sport. I need to find the same in a writing community. A group of peers to elevate me, keep me honest, have bitch sessions and whine, exchange publishing ideas. And to keep me invested.

I had hoped Scribophile was that group. The issue is uneven feedback and lack of focus. I joined a sub-group for beta reads; it was helpful to discuss in real time someone else’s impression of your writing but inconsistent in terms of genre, commitment, ability, etc. I appreciated them and their writing, but didn’t see a future with them. I also looked for local writing groups; there is a women-only group that meets in my local library and a quasi-group called Project Write Now.

I loved the stories about Chuck Palahniuk’s famous writing group. Authors sitting around a dining room table, reading and sharing thoughts. As the article mentions, each member of the group contributes a certain strength. The chance to get feedback, to bounce ideas, to share the thoughts and fears around writing.

The best next thing is to form a group myself… except I don’t know any authors. Not one. Check that, I do work with a guy who wrote a book and is working on a memoir, but he lives in downtown Manhattan and only writes non-fiction.

There are groups in Manhattan, and I (maybe??) will return there multiple times a week, but they don’t work logistically (meet in late evening/night, long after the last ferry home). I’m sure tried-and-true ways exist to form a writing group. I need to research them.

Until then, it’s still time to double down on guardrails, outlines, pre-work.

part 1

Many authors list editing as their favorite part of the process. After the shitty first draft is in place, the fun part can begin. Turning something crappy into a delightful story. This is where my inner critic comes out in full force… and lets me know the story isn’t interesting enough, or the characters are weak and undeveloped, or the plot questions aren’t strong. I’m fighting this right now with a story (tentatively called “Mags Hotel”); I had an idea for a short story, from a daily writing prompt (the story starts with the main character hearing something they’d never thought they’d hear again…) for Mags, a survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, who wakes up in a hotel with food and air conditioning. I wanted to explore two things; the mystery of the hotel, why was she there, etc. And, to have a deeper exploration into her transformed self… that she was more alive living on her own in the woods than she was as a project manager before the apocalypse. I’ve written it twice, but didn’t lay out an outline or decide what the big questions were in advance. Now it seems damn near impossible to fix what’s on the page.

But I will. Avoiding the work and worrying is exhausting, So I’ll borrow the same approach I used in the real world. Come up with a better system, where I work on outlines in advance. And, while still in outline form, I’ll ask the hard questions about narrative questions and themes and building tension… I need to acknowledge that this takes time and effort and focus, more than the actual fingers on keyboard part. I watched a small snippet of James Patterson’s MasterClass (I don’t think I’ll watch the whole thing, his process is very different ) but he made an interesting point… he takes a month to a month and a half to come up with an outline for a novel, and then continually revises and adds to the outline. That’s a very different mindset to my old approach… I viewed the outline as something to get out of the way and used as a loose guidepost.

And break down these tasks into bite-sized chunks. Violated my own rules by having “Edit process” as a to-do task. Too broad, too vague. A checklist of discrete tasks for each story should make each step more approachable.

Hopefully, I can follow up here in a few months with my new, new system, with questions and outlines and steps to complete stories quicker and better. And to chip away at the Resistance. Sharpen the saw .

I follow several authors online and via podcasts. One book that each author revered is “The War of Art” by Stephen Pressfield. I read it four or five years ago. The key point of the book is to acknowledge, control and push back against a blocking force he calls the Resistance, and to conduct writing or any artistic venture like a professional. I didn’t think I had a problem with Resistance as I have a steady daily routine. All good, right? But lately I’ve had a hard time sitting and doing the real work of planning and editing. It’s Resistance, just not in its classic form.

From Wikipedia: “Resistance is described in a mythical fashion as a universal force that has one sole mission: to keep things as they are… It is the force that will stop an individual’s creative activity through any means necessary, whether it be rationalizing, inspiring fear and anxiety, emphasizing other distractions that require attention, raising the voice of an inner critic, and much more. It will use any tool to stop creation flowing from an individual, no matter what field the creation is in.”

Pressfield tells stories about himself and other creatives unable to sit at the keyboard and get the words out. As aforementioned, I don’t have a problem banging out my words each morning. My resistance, I realized, is in the rest of the process.

Early on I wrote how I used to start stories with a deep, involved outline, then a backed off that practice… ending up without an outline, just an idea of what I was writing next. I hoped this would allow me to experiment and follow plots and characters wherever they might lead. And it has… I’ve cranked out a fair amount of work. But my pieces suffer from the same problems; lack of obvious structure, strong, interesting character arcs, etc. Elements that need to be planned out.

When I complete the shitty first draft, I’m reluctant to do the hard work of capital-E Editing. Major revisions, cutting entire scenes or characters, re-writing pages that don’t work. I’m happy to whittle away at sentences, but the comprehensive work and the big questions… that’s where I run right into the Resistance. I have 4 stories right now, 3 short ones and the novella, that need serious edits. Complete pieces, somewhere between the first and third draft done but I have, well, Resistance to doing the big edits.

I’m the oppositeIn “real” life. I’m a planner and an organizer; in my full-time job, I spend more than half of my week on strategic work. I’m always planning and laying out health or fitness or travel project as well…

part 2