Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "writing-withdrawal"
Short story theming
I've been writing little ones lately.
At my absolute best, I can vomit out the first draft to a doorstopper in just a couple months - my personal best is 133k words in 45 days. But I can only pull it off successfully a couple times a year, at best, and it's just as likely that I end up running out of steam halfway there and the story just peters out. The rest of my time is usually spent on revising and editing those raw drafts, gathering up new ideas, or all too likely, just faffing about.
And in the event that I do succeed and pull of one of these, the withdrawal is insane. Can you even imagine what it's like to write three thousand words every day for two months, then suddenly just run out of shit to write? The floodgates of imagination left open for so long, then losing their purpose and needing to be shut down after a habit is already formed? It's more unpleasant than you'd think.
Maybe if I learned to write like Stephen King and just immediately jump to a new project after finishing the last, but I'm not sure I could pull that off. I'll look into it.
For now I think I have a much better time doing short stories, on the whole. It only takes me a week or two to put one on paper in full, even when not on full steam - or just a couple days at my absolute best - which is nowhere near enough time to form a habit out of it: once I'm done, I can just stop writing and don't feel so terrible about it.
Now I've got about half a dozen of them written this year. There'd be enough of them to clump together into a reasonably-sized collection that I could throw in here for you.
Problem is, they don't really have anything to do with one another.
A story needs a theme at its heart - something to run it, rather than just a bunch of things that happen. That's difficult enough on its own, but I think that the same is true when a bunch of different stories are joined together under same covers: they would need a shared theme among them. Something to connect them all together.
Right now I'm writing of the queen of a small kingdom, fighting a megalomaniacal conquering prophet with the power to control weather. After this I'll probably write of the last lifeforms in the dying universe looking for a way to escape the inevitable by going back in time. And then there was the one I wrote earlier, a satire about modern video games. They don't even have the same main characters, or take place in the same world.
That said, I think I could continue some of them. Write more short stories and link them together. Watch this space.
At my absolute best, I can vomit out the first draft to a doorstopper in just a couple months - my personal best is 133k words in 45 days. But I can only pull it off successfully a couple times a year, at best, and it's just as likely that I end up running out of steam halfway there and the story just peters out. The rest of my time is usually spent on revising and editing those raw drafts, gathering up new ideas, or all too likely, just faffing about.
And in the event that I do succeed and pull of one of these, the withdrawal is insane. Can you even imagine what it's like to write three thousand words every day for two months, then suddenly just run out of shit to write? The floodgates of imagination left open for so long, then losing their purpose and needing to be shut down after a habit is already formed? It's more unpleasant than you'd think.
Maybe if I learned to write like Stephen King and just immediately jump to a new project after finishing the last, but I'm not sure I could pull that off. I'll look into it.
For now I think I have a much better time doing short stories, on the whole. It only takes me a week or two to put one on paper in full, even when not on full steam - or just a couple days at my absolute best - which is nowhere near enough time to form a habit out of it: once I'm done, I can just stop writing and don't feel so terrible about it.
Now I've got about half a dozen of them written this year. There'd be enough of them to clump together into a reasonably-sized collection that I could throw in here for you.
Problem is, they don't really have anything to do with one another.
A story needs a theme at its heart - something to run it, rather than just a bunch of things that happen. That's difficult enough on its own, but I think that the same is true when a bunch of different stories are joined together under same covers: they would need a shared theme among them. Something to connect them all together.
Right now I'm writing of the queen of a small kingdom, fighting a megalomaniacal conquering prophet with the power to control weather. After this I'll probably write of the last lifeforms in the dying universe looking for a way to escape the inevitable by going back in time. And then there was the one I wrote earlier, a satire about modern video games. They don't even have the same main characters, or take place in the same world.
That said, I think I could continue some of them. Write more short stories and link them together. Watch this space.
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