We have somehow defeated February — the shortest, but somehow also usually the worst, month. Slowly but surely, the days are getting longer again, and soon we’ll change the clocks and then hopefully I can resume being a functional human, after a long, extra-snowy winter.

Where I’m At

I’m at the beginning of a new project, and mostly having fun with it. That’s a pretty big relief, since last year was rough — burnout, health challenges, the world being on fire… it meant writing did not go well. My gentle goal for the year is to finish the rough draft of this project. That seems reasonable, even though I haven’t actually started the draft yet. Right now I’m pre-writing, and it’s taking me longer than I anticipated.

The thing is, that’s okay! Actually, I think it’s a good thing. See, a couple of years ago (the last time I was at the beginning of a project), I tried a new pre-writing method… and it worked so well. It produced the cleanest rough draft I’ve ever written, and that led to the quickest revision process I’ve ever done, too. Needless to say, I was hoping I could recreate that… but also pretty worried I couldn’t, that it had been a lightning-in-a-bottle project and I’d never have a writing experience that smooth again.

To recap, the new process looks like this:

1. Have a jumble of ideas that might possibly be a story.
2. Write a zero-draft, somewhere in the 35,000-50,000 word range (and do it quickly — one to two months). This produces something messy, which skips whole sections and doesn’t have to make sense, but gives me a better sense of the characters and world and the heart of the story.
3. Noodle on it for as long as I need to, writing little bits if I feel like it, maybe considering different plot points from each character’s point of view. This is the fun daydreaming part.
4. Write a lengthy synopsis (in prose, not bullet points) to figure out the actual plot, maybe rereading the fast draft (or maybe not). This synopsis doesn’t just focus on the external plot, but also goes into the character relationships and arcs, and is my chance validate that said arcs line up with all the external stuff so it all feels cohesive.
5. Draft a book!

This replaces a process where I do a quick outline in bullet points, write an 80k draft, realize it’s unworkable, throw it out, then rinse and repeat those same steps until I’ve tossed 200k, spent multiple years on it, and finally produce a rough draft I can work with and then have a tough time revising.

As you can imagine, not taking years and tossing hundreds of thousands of words makes it worth spending more time up front. I really, really wanted this new process to be repeatable. I suppose I won’t be able to say for sure until I’ve got a draft done whether or not it produced something workable, but so far, remarkably, so good.

The thing is, the reason I’m pretty sure it’s working is not because writing this synopsis has been smooth. In fact, it hasn’t been: I was 5,000 words into it, had spent all of January on it, and got all the way to the climax, when I realized it wasn’t actually working as a story at all. The relationship at the core was good, but the characters weren’t doing anything; there were some threads I’d tossed in to force events to happen which then had no pay off because they weren’t driving the story, but which were way more interesting that what was there. I tried to write a logline and found that to give it a hook, I had to pretend some of those events did drive the story and, well…

What if they did? It would be a better, more interesting story, that’s why it was a better, more interesting logline.

So I tossed out a month’s worth of pre-writing and started again. I’m really, really glad I did. What I’m working with now is much better, and it shows the process is working. I caught the issue after writing 5,000 words of a synopsis… not 80,000 words of a draft. Which means, I suspect, I just saved myself an entire year of work. Here’s hoping for a smooth year of writing to follow!

A Thing I Made

Something different this month… something different for me, too. I shared a few months ago, as part of a ceramic glazing, that I was intimidated by painting flowers — I don’t have any natural skill, or practice, at pretty much any form of visual art. Which remains true.

I don’t think I will ever be great, or even particularly good, at any form of visual art. Essentially: I have no eye for art, or even general observation; I don’t look at things and see details until someone points them out; I barely have the ability to make pictures in my head. I don’t have aphantasia, but I’m much, much closer to that end of the spectrum, which I suspect puts an upper limit on any visual artistic ability.

But so what? Since when do you have to be good at things to be allowed to do them?

A few years back, I bought a set of pastels on a whim. I didn’t do much with them except stick them in a drawer in shame because I’m Bad At Art, though the fact that I bought them means there’s something in me that wants to make art. Right now especially I have a yearning to do more creative stuff in my free time, so I dragged them out, watched a bunch of people on youtube doing pastel paintings and then… well, I tried it.

What you see above is not a pastel painting. Obviously. I’m working on being okay at being bad at at art, but it’s still a very vulnerable feeling to do something I know I’m bad at, so I’m not up to sharing. I don’t know if I ever will be, which is fine, since I’m doing this just for myself, for fun.

When I finished my first real attempt, I flipped the page over and made some notes. And didn’t realize until I picked things up to put them away that I had accidentally transcribed those notes right on to my desk, pressing pastel into the wood. It wiped away easily (and didn’t seem to hurt my art any, thankfully), but I snapped this pic before I cleaned it up.

My handwriting is bad enough when you’re just reading it. Like this, it’s almost impossible to make out. But the important bit is down at the bottom, fading off into a smudge: I will try again.

Happy March, everyone. Let’s all keep trying.