How to Write Something New

Tweet

There would appear to be three major 'versus' debates going on in publishing these days. You've got Self-publishing versus Traditional Models, there's Work for Free versus Alternate Income Stream, and Pants versus Plotting. I'm not going into the first two, but the third is one with which I've wrestled for some time.

The key pros and cons of Pants versus Plotting are quite straightforward. Writing by the seat of your pants lets you enjoy the creative process, going where the story takes you, and essentially 'making it up as you go along', but you can end up with dozens of dead ends, characters you don't even need, or endings that just flat out don't work because they don't make sense when compared to the beginning.

By contrast, plotting allows you to map out the work before you start, so you never sit down to write without knowing where the story is going, and you can work out story kinks before you even finish the book/story - it's much easier to rearrange elements in an outline than it is in the finished piece. Unfortunately, it can feel restrictive, and remove some of the 'surprises' that pop up when you're pantsing.

For most of my works, I've used a combination of the two. I've known the major points of the beginning, middle and end, and my writing process has been simply joining the dots, making it up as I go along to get from A to B. It lets me keep an ending in mind, but gives me enough freedom to give my imagination room to gambol about.

I came across Story Engineering by Larry Brooks and while it's a fascinating book with a lot going for it, I got sucked into the mindset of "You must outline to the very last detail", and it completely derailed my creativity. I wrote The Necromancer's Apprentice using his method, but I only started to enjoy it when I'd finished my first draft, and went back to insert scenes that I felt would give the story life. I've got another novella I want to write, and I've fully outlined it, but I find I can't start it - weirdly enough, I know what needs to happen where, but I don't know where to start, and I have that ever present worry that I can't do the outline justice.

A while ago, I wrote a post on The Magic of 500, and I decided to revisit it to see if it would help. For a long time, I've been using the 750words.com website, and I suddenly realised that while I've thought I don't have much time to write, I've been putting in 15-20 minutes every day to write 750 words of crap. I worked out that by writing 750 words a day, a 30k word novella could be written in just forty days. So I could use those twenty minutes to do something productive, leaving my longer bouts of time free to edit The Necromancer's Apprentice. Interesting...

I wrote a Friday flash a couple of weeks ago called Contagion, and I had a few calls to turn it into a novella. I dashed out an idea for the beginning, middle and end, and just started writing. Earlier today it passed the 6.5k mark. It's going to need a lot of editing but the important thing is that I'm writing again. Aside from Friday flashes, I haven't written anything new in a long time.

So long may it continue...

Deconstructing a flash

Tweet

By Nina Matthews Photography

I had a pretty good response to my most recent Friday Flash, Blind Date, and I thought I'd take a moment to explain why I chose to focus on the character that I did. The intended misdirection won't work if you read this post first, so go take a look at the story and then come back.

*sits and whistles a spot of Tyketto while she waits*

Back? Good! I hope you enjoyed that, because I certainly enjoyed writing it. Well, once I figured out how to do it. My original story contained a lot more dialogue, but the first version made it too obvious who Christopher's blind date was before the final reveal. It was also too long, so I scrapped it. Nor did the story work in third person. I needed to switch it into first person in order to let Christopher explain why he'd willing let himself be picked up by a strange woman on behalf of someone else. In the first version, Christopher was an unwitting victim, led astray by simple curiosity, but I decided to make him a slimy con artist who gets his just desserts.

Why? Well, mostly because I love the character of Medusa, and I didn't want to portray her as a monster. I realised that classic mythology does exactly that, but I've always felt somewhat sorry for Medusa. She was originally a very beautiful woman, turned into a monster by the goddess Athena. She has several "origins stories" - in one, she descrates Athena's temple by sleeping with Poseidon, leading to Athena turning Medusa into a monster in a fit of pique. This particular legend also sees Medusa killed by Perseus, and her dead body gives birth to Pegasus (Medusa and Poseidon's son). In another legend, Medusa is not the femme fatale, but rather a beautiful mortal seduced by Poseidon in Athena's temple. Again, Athena loses her temper and turns Medusa into a monster, but she also grants her the power of turning people into stone. There is yet another legend in which Medusa is simply born hideous, and the shock of seeing her turns people to stone. At some point, her power was changed to only affect men.

So I got to thinking. What if Perseus hadn't killed her? What if she was still living in her cave somewhere, paralysed by the knowledge that she must stay hidden or risk turning people to stone? Wouldn't she get awfully lonely? I've chosen the legend in which her power only works on men, which in turn raises questions about the destructive female gaze (in cinema in particular, the destructive gaze is usually characterised as male - look at the opening scene of Halloween, or ANY of Peeping Tom). Medusa can be seen to represent the potential "threat" of female sexuality toward the established male hierarchy. For me personally, she represents the suppressed woman, or the tragic figure punished for the crimes of another (in this case, Poseidon). She's granted destructive power as well as monstrosity, although I did like the fact that in 2010's Clash of the Titans, she was still depicted as being beautiful as well as monstrous.

So there was my construction of Medusa - beautiful but lonely woman hampered by an extreme disability, and unable to find a companion. In a way, her entire being has been destroyed by Poseidon's selfish act, and now Medusa has to live with the consequences. I added an extra layer of symbolism by naming her faithful servant Daphne - in Greek mythology, Daphne was a beautiful nymph pursued by Apollo. Determined to preserve her virginity and not predisposed to enjoy the attentions of a god, she prays to the river for help, and she is transformed into a laurel tree. Both Daphne and Medusa are punished for being attractive to men.

Enter sleazy Christopher, and the stage is set. I suppose it helps that one of my favourite songs is Heart's If Looks Could Kill, a revenge song from a woman to her unfaithful boyfriend. Medusa's last line of dialogue came from her as I was writing, although it's entirely possible that it's from the part of my consciousness that is crippled by self-esteem issues. However, I chose to keep Medusa hidden until the end as I wanted the first section to be very much from Christopher's point of view. We have no knowledge of the identity of his date until he does - although we escape being turned into stone and get to see Medusa's sad reaction. Sure, I could be accused of denying Medusa a voice or a point of view but that's not the point of this flash.

So there you have it! That's how I constructed the flash. Any questions?