Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 126
June 26, 2017
Original Formula Dept.
One of the standard rites of passage for any creator seems to be to have a moment where you realize something you stumbled across on your own isn't in fact unique to you — that other people have been doing it forever, and you're just late to the party.
June 25, 2017
Shall We Put A Label On That? Dept.
The other day someone asked me, "Given your interest in Zen Buddhism and some of the subjects of your fiction, does that mean you're writing 'Buddhist fiction'?"
My answer was, "I don't really think so."
June 24, 2017
By The Seat Of The Pants, Or Maybe The Bottoms Of The Pockets Dept.
A Writer's View: Plotting, Pantsing, And Agile - Steven Savage
At some point in writing you can only plan so much before you have to write����� it���s a matter of degree. This truth can frustrate some plotters, because you can only define so much before there���s nothing left to do. Your ideas may be totally wrong, your plan may be horrible, your plot awful ��� but you won���t know until you start writing.
Steven is echoing here something I've circled back to often: no plan for fiction surv...
June 19, 2017
Unclog The Backlog Dept.
Some major things will be happening at Chez Genji over the next couple of months.
June 17, 2017
Let's Do It Again Dept.
Steve calls it "timey-wimey creativity." I call it something else. The label doesn't really matter; the important thing is that it's the process of iterative discovery with a creative work. You write one draft, and even in the middle of that draft you discover goalposts drifting downfield, so you hurry after them. Sometimes you try to chase them down and drag them back into position, but most of the time you're better off just moving the game to where they are.
The one thing to not do is stay...
June 14, 2017
Self Control Dept.
My Agile Life: Only Me - Steven Savage
When I began doing my Agile Life, I had a most interesting experience; I had only myself to blame for anything. ��I was the only responsible one when most anything went wrong.
Something was late? My fault. Something not done well? My fault. Very, very few cases of things that wreren���t due to me. To blame anyone else would have required a Herculean effort of self-delusion that I just don���t have the energy or lack of morals for.
Reading those words r...
June 13, 2017
The Mess-Age Dept.
The night before, Steven Savage and I got to talking about themes in our respective works. He is preparing to work on a project called��A Bridge To The Quiet Planet — it promises it to be quite a corker, from everything he's told me about it so far — and was quite conscious of the specific themes he wanted the material to address. Or, rather, the themes suggested by the material that he wanted to make sure the story addresses properly.
One thing we both noted is how discovery of theme is an i...
June 8, 2017
Rocks In Your Head (And Out Of Them) Dept.
A Writer's View: Big Damn Rocks - Steven Savage
I found a huge,��huge problem in working on my new novel is that I���d have these great ideas that I���d never get rid of or change as I���d become dedicated to them ��� meanwhile the story, characters, and setting had evolved beyond them. ��I had all these Big Rocks I just wasn���t willing to get rid of, yet all my other great ideas kept running into them. The solution was to ditch them. ��If you have an idea that squashes all your other ideas...
Unscripted Dept.
Prepare yourselves. With this post, I'm going to do one of two things:
1) Synthesize two previously incompatible strains of thought in my psychic economy of creativity, or
2) Make a fool of myself.
June 7, 2017
Lock, Stock, And Character Dept.
Literary fiction is borrowing the tools of the science fiction genre.
Supposedly, the advantage to having literary novelists take up stories once dismissed as the stuff of genre fiction is that readers can get exciting plots to go with the mainstays of literary work: nuanced characters and the kind of aestheticized writing conventionally referred to as beautiful. The latter is a dubious improvement. Beautifully written is a phrase often applied to any fiction that involves a lot of poetic la...
