A Spring writing update

My world is lousy with gorgeous blooms and a little progress. How are you?

Reading time: approximately 7 minutes

Hello, my darlings. 💖 It's...May.

How did that happen??

Two trips and two illnesses later, we meet again. (Why do I keep getting sick this year?) Even though it's been a whirlwind two-ish months, you've been on my mind. No, really!

(Also there are a lot more of you now? Hi! Welcome! Thanks for being here.)

Let's catch up!

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When we last left our intrepid explorer (that's me!), she was creating a Writer's Grimoire, considering zero-drafting a novel, and ripping apart a short story to get a better look at its insides. How did all that go, you say?

Um, really great, actually. I finished my Grimoire--well, it'll never be finished, there's always more to learn about craft. But the foundations are in place, and it's really sturdy. When I get stuck, I go back to it and I get ideas about shifting my approach to the story I am working on, and very easily get unstuck. It's been so reassuring to have a central storehouse of all the craft ideas and explanations that work for me, linked up to the tools I can use to implement them.

I've not worked more on my novel-in-progress, but that's intentional—I want more short-form practice first. Instead I finished analyzing and really breaking down McKinley Valentine's "The Code For Everything". Every time I read this story—and it's been dozens of times now—I am more appreciative of the craft that went into it.

(We can talk more about what I learned from this story later. If you want. Comment below with a 🌸 if you'd like me to tell you what I gleaned!)

I got the idea to study-through-dissection from Ben Percy in his craft book Thrill Me. (You can hear him talk about this more here.) Studying how a story is put together is something I've heard of before, but for movies or novels, not for shorts. It's not something I've been able to do well, because I was never able to understand what I was looking at. Or what I was looking for. Even when I finally understood structure, structure is only one element of the story-making game. Taking apart the structure, then the scenes, then the beats, paragraph by paragraph, seeing how each line connected to the next, how the characters moved through the narrative, what techniques were used on every level of story—it's a whole new depth of understanding.

It went so well that I decided to take up the second half of Percy's craft assignment: to write a story using the same structure, and the same techniques in the same order as the one I just dissected. That's what I've been doing these last two months (when not travelling or ill). And it's been.....

SO

GOOD.

I mean, and also frustrating and terror-inducing and crazy-making. So, bullet points:

The good

• Constraints! The constraints of working with specific structure and techniques has made decision-making and ruminating on the story so much easier and productive.

• Time. I decided to walk away from everything I know about the timeline of how long it "should" take to write a short story (which is usually on the order of a week, maybe a whole month). I'm letting myself take as long as I want.

• Research. I'm researching for a short story. Hard-core researching. Which feels like saying: I'm herding cats to the moon. I don't remember hearing any writers say they do this. But I had an idea that my character is an algorithm. Now I'm reading a book about social media algorithms. I had an idea that my character's psychology is similar to that of a man stuck in a patriarchal masculinity worldview that isn't bringing him happiness, so I just finished reading a book about exactly that. I don't know how to represent a fully online space, so I am watching TV shows and movies that do that, gathering ideas. Do you know how to name an algorithm? Me either, but an afternoon reading about Python scripts got me sorted out and my character named.

• Process. Up until now, what I've known about the short story writing process is to push through a rough draft and then make it better. I've had limited success with this process, and I've blamed my lack of success on not understanding how story works. I think that's only part of the issue. This time around I am not jumping into drafting: I am reflecting, contemplating, and figuring. There is woolgathering. There is time in the shower staring at nothing and having sudden ideas. I'm journaling, I'm filling out character sheets, I'm making to-do lists for each story beat.

The bad

• Constraints! How closely I should stick to McKinley Valentine's structure with this very different story is a constant source of uncertainty, crescendoing into anxiety every so often.

• Time. I wanted to give myself the gift of time, but instead what I have given myself is the feeling of it taking too long, with 0 reference metrics for what "too long" could possibly be, which means I've no good way to calm that agitation down. I find myself gritting my teeth and insisting to whomever it is that I address my inner monologue to that whatever amount of time it takes is JUST FINE.

• Research. I spent two weeks taking notes on two different non-fiction books by hand. Every day, 5-7 written pages of notes in a composition journal. Plus 1-2 pages of written reflection. 2-3 hours a day. I foolishly wondered why my right elbow stiffened up so badly at night I could barely straighten it out, and why lifting anything with my right hand was wobbly at best. I freaked out about how much research I could possibly need to write a story that--if I follow the structure of the story I studied--will be 1500 words long. I begin to wonder if I am, in fact, taking crazy pills.

• Process. Thanks to all that meticulous note-taking and journaling, I know that I started working on this story on March 11, 2024. I have since created all kinds of documents to hold various kinds of notes across 5 different software platforms and 1 notebook totaling something like--conservatively--25,000 words. And not one of those words are in a draft or a manuscript. What the ever-loving f@$* am I even doing?!

That is, until yesterday.

Yesterday, while in the middle of suffering through the beginning of Tron: Legacy in the name of worldbuilding, some lines of actual real no-fooling story popped into my head. I wrote them down. Later that evening, another line joined them.

(They are lines from the middle of the story, with an as-yet unnamed and undefined character, but with all this lead-in, if you are still reading you absolutely deserve to see them, even if they will make no sense to you [they barely make sense to me], so here they are:

The AI looked around. "Nice sim. I can really feel the misery and despair weighing me down. Did someone program dust onto the top of that filing cabinet?"

sorts_best shrugged. "The humans make the construct."

"Mmm," the AI said. "Of course. They invented irony, but they don't really get it, do they? It's fine; I got you. Question: "

Unfinished, of course, I don't have enough context to know what the AI is going to ask my main character. Yet.)

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So there you have it: the long answer to how the writing has been going for me. The short answer might be: writing seems to be happening, + or - a few neuroses that have come along for the ride. I'm excited that this new process might be getting me somewhere. It's really frustrating, though, to be continually uncertain what the next step in the process is. I know there's no other way to try things out, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Truly, I envy those among you who love making huge artistic messes and delight in figuring it all out as you go. Envy and respect. I'll just be over here, stuffing my unconscious full of all the raw material I think it could need and praying for an alchemical miracle.

Going forward I plan to post more; I have some ideas for what I'd like this newsletter to be, and we'll see if that vision gains any traction. In the meantime, updates with a more once-a-month regularity are the plan. But don't be completely surprised if a little writing crafty tidbit appears in your inboxes before then!

Thank you tons for being awesome you!!

Be well with 💖s,

Elnora