In Spite of Opinions, Education Works Sometimes

I have just finished my spring break. In a fit of minor irony, I spent the whole break applying my education. This is the story:

On the twelfth of this month, so just exactly one week ago, my mentore Jenny found a contest with a particular theme. We thought it'd be cool if the UGWP all attempted to write a story which fit the theme. We have just enough time to maybe write a story before submitting to our next critique meeting at the end of this month, do the critique during April, and get our critiques back in time to rewrite before the May first deadline for the contest. We are the Underground Writing Project, after all, so doing projects is a good idea. It made me nervous, though, because my writing process almost always takes a gazillion years. I have to ponder and meander and experiment. There's a lot of not writing parts of my process. Having only thirteen days to bring a story from nothing but a random prompt to fully fleshed seemed undoable in that time.

I'm down for trying and going down in flames any day. The try needed to be a good one, so I did the following:

Step one (happening on the twelfth): My first inspirational process is musical. The contest theme is "In the Dark." I had no idea for characters or situations at first. To discover some I put my zune on shuffle and thought about the phrase "In the Dark" and things that therein might occur. After an hour or two of my utter mishmash of musical taste I had an answer to the question which every story ought to answer; that question being: who is it about, what does he want, what's in the way, and does he get it or not? I had an answer. It felt good.

Step two (still on the twelfth): I wrote a mad and completely banal three pages of prose that gave the loosest possible rundown of the story. It was hardly even useable as an outline, but it did suggest certain continuity strengths and weaknesses to press or amend.

Step three (still on the twelfth): Wrote a dramatic outline. I've talked about Shakespeare's Five Act structure before. I really believe in it as a useful tool for designing interesting, dramatic story structures. If you like bullet pointed outlines especially--I do--then it's a great way of visualizing how the story could really look while leaving yourself enormous flexibility. The outlines I write in this vein tend to look like a bunch of visuals and trigger points that might be essential to telling the story. Through experience I've discovered that this outlining process has some huge drawbacks. "Finished" stories written entirely and only according to this outline tend to be somewhat flat and obscure, somehow. Without a little coaxing they lack directness or conflict. It's strange but true.

Step four (still on the twelfth): Tried to start step four and discovered that writing the same story from start to finish twice in one day got annoying and I couldn't quite conjure the will to start. Took a break.

Step five (on the thirteenth): Wrote a Five Beats outline of the story. A couple months back, Jan C Jones, an editor of sorts, came to be a guest critic at a UGWP meeting. She explained that movies often have a structure of five major "beats," or important steps, that make an entertaining story. I found the advice really good. I'd been thinking about trying it as an outlining technique, so for this story I did. It took up one page of my notebook. So far all of these outlines had taken up almost eight pages, which together is not that much writing, but it was a huge amount of work. I'd written the story three times in two days already and I was gaining the familiarity that I think you need in order to tell a story well.

Step six (on the fourteenth): Now, I wanted to write it as a script. There are three kinds of scripts with which I have any familiarity: movie scripts, play scripts, and comic book scripts. I've recently had a positive experience using a comic book script as an outline for a story. I wanted to try it again. For this one I decided to try a script for a play. A friend of mine suggested that stage play scripts emphasize where people are on the stage. That would be important for the story I had conceptualized. Scripts are a good outlining tool, I feel, because you can get a whole story out, with scenes and setting and dialogue and all, without fussing with especially pretty prose. You're freed up to leave the prose aside and concentrate on it later. Well, I started the script. It never got very far because by page two of it I had a sudden inspiration of a good way to start the actual prose story. It felt right to leave the script aside and just strike into the story while the energy was there.

So now today is the nineteenth. I just finished writing the story--it needs some editing, but it's all outside my head now. Because of the intense outlining I did there the process was pretty fast. I had five whole days to dawdle. Now I can go over it and fix typoes. The ride was fun, though I lack objectivity about the result.

I think this was a good process. Y'all should try it.

From Script to Descripting: A Short Story Story

To all my fans, thank you one person. To all my other readers, I'm glad the fourteen of your are patient. To my eight specific critics, whose opinions I nought but respect, you guys are sometimes a bunch of adamant crazies.

One time during a UGWP meeting we were talking about screenplays. We talked about how we'd like to get our books turned into movies and whether we wanted to oversee the screenwriting. The general consensus was yeah, probably. The question then arose whether we'd want to do the whole screenplay ourselves. Now I happen to know that rarely does it occur that one person writes the have-all-end-all screenplay of a movie. Scripts of movies are organic, molded to scenes and days and what the last scene was doing and suchlike. The long and short of the discussion was that we, in general, didn't want to write our whole screenplay ourselves. Consult on it, sure, but we didn't want to be the primary screenwriter. We'd already written the damn story, we didn't want to write it again. I'm sure our opinion will be as organic as the screenwriting process demands, but whatever, we'll burn that bridge when we get there.

During this conversation I raised another point which had been mumbling around my mind for a while. I've been in an outlining education of late, and I've been getting excited about different outlining varieties and tools. One outlining tool I've been thinking about without quite applying it was writing a screenplay version of a story and then adapting the novel from that story. The way I see it, if patience held, then a screenplay would be a good outline. You'd get all the dialog and visuals out of your head, you could line up the story beats, figure out the acts, get to know the characters, without being bogged down with prettiness of prose and poetry in narration. It'd be like writing a whole book without any of the parts of a book that are hard to write. It's a great theory. I proposed it to the UGWP--the Underground Writing Project. Now, the thing about the UGWP is they're a bunch of studied, dedicated cats who have spent a lot of man hours figuring out how to write a good story. Together their accomplishments and expertise equal a doctorate or three and a sizable bookshelf of most excellent prose and poetry. Among them I am something like the novice, and I respect their opinions. Abandon all hope, they said. Why, they queried, would you want to write your novel twice? Why, they said, put yourself through the headache? I pondered for a time about how we expect to scrap our first draft anyway...then dismissed the thought as a passing whimsy of whimsy.

Lately, I have revisited ye olde preposterous concept, in ze form of necessary adventures in coworking. A script proposal I wrote has been accepted by Cellar Door Anthology--kudos for me. Naturally, I required a goodly artist to be drawering the comic book, for I am a most useless artist. As a point of immense fortuity, the lovely lass who has been so good as to grace me with her good will for a time is an excellent artist. My lady has a style close to mine as well. Having asked her to draw the comic book, and having finished a tolerably contentable script for it, we began to realize that my script writing skills leave a great deal to be required. Though my lass has an excellent imagination for visuals, she found my script hard to follow. I wrote it as a panel-by-panel recap of the story as I saw it, because the comic book scripts I've seen are written like that. She couldn't follow it, though. We began our conversation about the story with me saying I'd trust her to do good visuals of the story. But she couldn't visualize my script. However, she's had good luck envisioning other stories I've written, taken from the prose. In reply to her, I adapted the script for the comic book to a short story. I expected it to take me a while, but in two afternoons I did all of it but the last scene. The process of copying and pasting the dialog I wrote and filling in the description felt natural, intuitive. I even had a reasonably original voice for it, because I already knew from the beginning what I wanted the end to say. I found that I adapted the dialog a tiny bit, but not a great deal.

It went well, felt good. The result pleases me. I haven't shown it to anyone but my lass yet, but I hope my eye has been trained well enough that I can give an okay appraisal of my stuff. I'm not sure if the process could be easily repeated for a longer work. I have definitely decided that it has some kind of merit. I will not argue with the opinion of the UGWP that it probably ought to be hesitated before decided upon, but I have now conducted one successful experiment of the process. We shall see what future it has.

This song was nearly picked at random. I like it anyway: