Leo X. Robertson's Blog, page 6

New Losing the Plot, with William Meikle!

Listen here!

William Meikle is a Scottish author who lives in Canada. He has twenty-five novels and over 300 short stories published! Can you believe it? Well, we had a chat and I can confirm he is a real human.

Amongst other things, we talk about reading the classics, cuddly isopods and Gerard Butler.

His latest books:

“Infestation” (Severed Press)

“Operation Antarctica” (Severed Press)

“The Ghost Club: Newly Found Tales of Victorian Terror” (Crystal Lake Publishing)

(Not “The Victorian Ghost Club” as I kept calling it, sorry!)

“I Am The Abyss” (novellas by Meikle and others) (Dark Regions Press)

Meikle’s website

As always, if you’re a reader, writer, creative type, someone with something to say, you can always get in touch with me using losingtheplotpodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. I look forward to hearing from you!

And by the way, Marshall, who provided Losing the Plot’s intro music, has a new album out! Check out “MARS HALL” at Captain Crook Records!

Story Systems, Part 5/5

In this series of posts, I’ve invited the
reader to see a story as a “meaning-generating system”, and story-writing akin
to a simulation that requires good initial conditions to run properly. Now I have
some more thoughts on this analogy, on reading other people’s writing, and some
final messages.

Sometimes simulations are chains of smaller
simulations. Simulations within simulations!

Example: Franzen said “The Corrections” is
“five linked novellas.” So then we can break it down into five components, the
input of novella 1 sent to novella 2 and so on. Those novellas have chapters,
and those chapters have sections, each sub-systems running different
sub-routines for some greater whole, generating meaning and passing it from one
simulation to the next.

Dostoyevsky’s tomes are usually split into
“Book the First”, “Book the Second” etc, and the same principle applies.

Short story writers attempting novels for
the first time often refer to them as a series of short stories. And fair
enough.

The analogy holds up no matter how big or
small the system is! At one end, the story ideas you don’t pursue are the inert
components that don’t do anything in the reactor. At the other end, 1000-page
novels are factories, with systems and sub-systems that can be scrutinised and
re-run to test the effect on the whole machine. Book series are like systems of
factories in a production line.

So we’ve covered that most of writing is
re-writing. Similarly, reading is re-reading.

Once you can see other people’s writing as a
mixture of different components, you can “uncook the ingredients.” My first
dumb analogy, but you get what I mean.

Very few stories don’t reveal their
mechanisms on repeat readings. And, much like you read through your own story
drafts collecting different errors, you can read through other people’s stories
and focus on different aspects of storytelling: plot, setting, characterisation,
structure etc.

Once you have the components, in your own
writing you can say to yourself, “I think what we need here is to run program(Cormac
McCarthy).” In William
Gibson’s Paris Review interview, he referred to other authors as “pedals”:
“revving Ballard” for example.

This may seem cynical—but applying an
author’s style is just choosing a sub-system. The overall system will still be
unique if the combination is different. And this combination is just one level
on which you are making the decisions. It still represents your style.

When I read my stories back, I can feel in
different paragraphs which real-life event, thing someone said, person I was
thinking of, film I saw, story I read, thing that was happening to me at the
time. All these are just a unique set of launching pads.

Okay, one final thought on the re-iteration
process of redrafting: remember that whatever flaws are there are going to be
most apparent to you, and that it’s impossible to read your own writing with
the freshness of its first reader. You may get this way in the future, but it’s
not worth considering. I’d advise focusing on the secondary joy of watching the
thing get better, better, better—but never perfect.

Even if you’re less aware of the errors
than an objective reader, only so much rigor can be expected of you. If you’ve
seen the film “Annihilation”, check out this review of
it, replete with error messages!

The complaints are valid, but the film
suspended my disbelief enough to sweep me away. I loved it! And yet in many
ways it is quite imperfect. Could do better. Who couldn’t?!

I think this is interesting: these errors
meant that the film “didn’t work for that viewer.” But it still worked for me, either
because I’m denser or more forgiving. I prefer the latter.

With more writing rigor, the film could’ve
won over a larger audience. Those errors that I didn’t notice would’ve been
corrected. That would hardly have impacted my viewing experience, but would’ve
satisfied those more nitpicky folk.

There’s too much emphasis on subjectivity.
It’s offered to easily appease people who didn’t do as good a job as they could
have, and that review is a good example of what it means when a story “doesn’t
work” for someone. Failure to resonate may be a question of rigor.

This also reveals how to interpret
rejections. It’s rare that a story is a complete outright failure—but the more
prestigious the publisher, the more rigor will be expected. And rigor can be
approached systematically, using the method of these blog posts.

Writing is a skill you can learn like any
other, and improving at it is tangible.

Finally:

·        
You decide what works for you.

·        
Rigor is not the same as
bullying yourself.

·        
Writing is always a light and
inviting thing filled with the reward of meaning, requiring trust and
curiosity.

·        
The easiest way to scare away
trust and curiosity is to bully yourself and give up hope.

So believe in yourself, dirtbag!!

A new horror story from me!

Hello lovely people,

Expanded Horizons is back from hiatus with a new story from me!

“Petronomicon” is about a process engineer in Norway who follows a cute guy to a haunted offshore platform. I will not be answering questions about where I get my ideas thank you ;)

It’s also available in HellBound Books’ Big Book of Bootleg Horror: Volume II which I enjoyed a whole lot!!

Story note: this one polarised af when I sent it out. Some people loved it, but I also received the meanest personalised rejection for it, by someone who didn’t understand why the protagonist was gay. If science can’t work that one out, I don’t see why I should have to :P

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more inevitable Robertson publications!

Story Systems, Part 4/5

So far, I’ve discussed how I’ve started to
look at writing stories, and a way to prepare to write a first draft and how to
edit it once it’s in existence.

(As for how to make the first draft? Just
type!)

Here’s how I’ve developed this way of
writing, and why I think it works.

Last year, I started sending stories to the
most prestigious mags I could find. This made me terrified of writing badly. Especially
if I combined this with reading the magazines while writing a first draft. “Look
at this garbage I’m writing compared to what these writers are capable of!” I
thought.

Anyway, my fear of bad writing meant that
when I’d written what I thought was a finalised story, I didn’t want to probe
it too hard lest it fall apart.

I also came up with the idea that preparing
as much as possible before starting a story made me a bad writer.

I was probably thinking of this quote: “[Chekhov’s]
friend and fellow writer Vladimir Korolenko wrote in his memoirs that when
asked how he wrote his stories, Chekhov laughed, snatched up the nearest object
- an ashtray - and said that if Korolenko wanted a story called The Ashtray, he
could have it the next morning.”

I’m willing to bet Chekhov spent most of
that day taking notes though! Doing a bit of free association, thinking of the
role of ashtrays in his life. Did anything curious happen to him involving an
ashtray, or when one was in the room? What is his opinion of them, of smokers?

Ray Bradbury did the same thing. He started
off writing stories starting from just the titles. So I thought, “This is how
you’re supposed to find the good stories.”

I do think the best moments of my writing
come straight from the subconscious. When I’m writing a first draft, they’re
when the story seems to “take off”, writes itself without me. (I hope you’ve
had this feeling! It’s the best.) They’re the parts of my writing that even I
can’t explain. But when I look back on when those moments occurred, they were
when I’d finally found the time to write a story I was super excited about,
because I strongly suspected that it led somewhere interesting. I’d been
thinking about the story, or the topic the story is about, for months—not
consciously, just in the back of my mind along with all my other thoughts. All
those cumulative fragments of thought poured out for those stories. However,
conscious effort, in the form of preparation, can be done to increase the
chance of a first draft “taking off.”

This emphasis on preparation is present in this
blog post, which is one of the best things I read about writing last year.

His advice about the characters didn’t
quite click for me, which is why I prefer to think of story preparation as a series
of questions to answer, rather than real people to interrogate.

I even have another dry scientific analogy
here!

Crystallisation is when solid crystals come
out of a solution. This can be done “spontaneously”, just by waiting in hope
that crystals will appear in the right conditions; or, by the introduction of
“seed crystals.” Seed crystals are small crystals of whatever compound is in
the solution, and they’re added so the crystallisation process has something to
grab onto. This is a much faster process!

So, if you make a small version of “story
stuff” before you begin the story creation process, you will create the story
faster.

This isn’t the same as predetermining where
the story should go. Having a planned trajectory, so you don’t go nuts in every
direction, is placing a seed crystal in a solution. You might get there without
it, but you’ll get there faster and with less effort if you have a good seed

Story Systems, Part 3/5

So far, I’ve introduced an analogy for how
to think about stories and the writing process. I then discussed in more detail
how this helps to think about the writing process: initial conditions, running
a simulation.

If simulations are set up improperly, the
software returns error messages. What are error messages in the context of
writing stories?

Here are some from the current draft of the
story I’m writing:

·        
Rewrite
opening scene once we know main character better.

·        
Not
quite hitting the emotional beats properly overall. Verify on re-type.

·        
[Sub-character1]
characterization?

·        
[Sub-character2]
characterization?

·        
Send
story to dad when done!

·        
More
characterization of protagonist here. A little more about what she wanted to
do.

·        
Ending isn’t quite right.

·        
Maybe [this idea] doesn’t work. Think more about [that
idea] instead.

The reason I’m getting these
“characterization” messages is that I’m revising a draft of something I wrote
before coming up with my current method. I now have to go back and do work I
should’ve done before starting, in order to rewrite what I have. It’s clear to
me that I don’t know these characters as well as I have known other characters
of mine in other stories (which is, of course, my best gauge of how good a job
I can do.)

“Send to dad when done” is not really an
error(!) but a great sign—a highly marketable story is clean enough that you would
let your own parents read it. (I don’t see this as a compromise, though: I’ve
had a great run of violent and disgusting writing—and may have many more!)

All the text in my drafts is now blue, by
the way. That’s so I don’t see it as final. I like to type everything because
it’s so easy—but it requires extra discipline not to see a story as complete
for as long as possible.

Sometimes I’ll wake up and write notes in my phone of
something I need to add to the story draft—and when I look at the draft, I see
that same note already incorporated. That’s a great sign! The subconscious is almost
nagging you to make sure the story is as it should be.

These messages also require me to take out
ideas that I liked at the time because they no longer fit with the story’s new
direction. I don’t ever feel a “click” when a story is done, but when I make
these decisions, I feel the story getting better, better, better… what once was
flat becomes alive. The characters feel more real, their decisions gaining
weight, the settings more detailed. It’s a real joy.

There’s joy to be found in all parts of the
writing process, from first draft to final edit. I think why authors think they
dread writing so much is that it’s always tough to start. And you spend most of
your day not starting, therefore you’re inclined to let the dread of
not-yet-having-started mask the joy of creation.

These stories I’ve repaired recently—I had
no faith in them at all. This was a great place to work to test this theory
out, because these were the easiest to work on extensively. I didn’t have
anything to ruin, or anything to lose. All to gain. And it’s not even like I changed
all that much in the end.

When I read through, I typically collect
these error messages at the top of the document. If they pertain to specific
areas in the story, I’ll copy and paste them there. If, like
“characterisation”, they require me to think a bit more about a particular
aspect before I revisit the story, I’ll type them out where the error is. This
is good enough for me. If you want, you can categorise these errors:

1.      
Structure:

o  
Need for opening scene?

o  
Chapter 3 too long: split into
two.

2.      
Middle:

o  
Scene 3 and 4 can be combined.

3.      
Grammar:

o  
Is it “lay” or “lie”? I can
never remember…

4.      
Character:

o  
Steve doesn’t serve a purpose
significantly discernible from Joe. Combine.

5.      
Senses

o  
Add smell/colour to beginning
section

Maybe you have more diffuse categories
related to elements more specific to your story. Up to you

Story Systems, Part 2/5

In my previous blog post on this topic, I
explained how stories are analogous to computer simulations, in a way I thought
might help people who think like me. In this post I explain how to set up the
“initial conditions” for a new story.

I vividly remember trying to plot a full
novel using different post-its for different characters. I wrote up drafts for
the first scenes of each character, and they stayed on my wall for a month. I
didn’t get any further with it, because I hadn’t written those scenes. I just
had my initial conditions, but I hadn’t let the simulation run. Once I wrote up
those scenes, the next steps became apparent.

What do good initial conditions look like?
To me, it’s notes on plot, character, theme and setting.

(Research is often a big one for me, and a
big competitive advantage: few people do the initial-condition due diligence
required to start writing something heavily researched.)

What do I know about these characters? Who
are they, were they, etc? Where will this story take place and why? What is
going to happen? What do I think this story is about?

I answer as many of these questions as I
can before I’ll get to typing out anything of the first draft.

I don’t see how someone can write a good
story without knowing more about the characters than appears on the page. When
it’s done, all a reader’s questions must be implicitly answered by the
resulting text. Better to answer as many up front so as to minimise work later
on.

And this isn’t a rigid, systematic
approach: I don’t know if your story takes place on Earth, if your characters
are human or a collection of bitter shoeboxes, or if the plot takes the path of
a fractal. There is still infinite scope within this methodology. After all, there
are many types of reactors: plug-flow, continuous stirred-tank, semibatch,
catalytic. They’re different shapes, and mix different reagents, but they all
contain reactions and operate on the same basic principles, which underpin the
great machines and chains thereof that lead raw material to product, from
beginning to end.

You may want to add “structure” notes, but
nothing irks me more these days than cleverly structured stories: lists, FAQs,
whatever. I try to avoid anything that reminds me that this thing didn’t really
happen, and anything so calculated and transparent just never resonates as much
as it could.

(Side note: I think list stories sell so
well because readers know when the thing is going to end. I have to imagine
they’re written for people who can’t wait to stop reading.)

And if you’re anything like me, you most
certainly will not make any notes on
genre or audience, what market you will send the story to when it’s done. I
mean, you may wish to add certain definite components to the initial conditions
if you’re writing for a specifically themed submission—but anything more
specific and you can correct it later.

So, when you write a bit about the plot, or
the setting, more characters appear. They need characterised. Details of
backstory appear. They need added to the plot. They have settings. Those
settings have characters. And so on and round and round.

How do you know when you’ve done enough?
Because nothing more occurs to you. It sounds, through my outline above, like
it will keep going indefinitely—but background characters don’t need as much
work. Some scenes take place in the same setting, and so on. There are definite
limits. A story itself, no matter how big, is finite.

Next time I’ll write about re-drafting

Story Systems, Part 1/5

I’m getting better at writing short
stories. I attributed my increase in success thus far to the notion of
“choosing better premises”, coming up with more ideas than necessary and
developing those that seemed to have the most energy to me at the time. This is
a way of “pre-vetting” a story before you’ve even written it!

What I’m doing now—one of my favourite
early-in-the-year exercises, is improving stories I haven’t yet had published.
Doing so has taught me what I can do beyond “choosing better premises” to take
my stories to the next level in a way that feels intuitive to me. I’ve come up
with a method that seems technically rigorous but airy enough to let the
subconscious in. In the following series of blog posts, that’s what I want to
share.

(And when I say “intuitive”, it means I
won’t seem to be saying anything you don’t already know—maybe just articulating
it in the way it makes sense to me. An attempted demystifying process.)

They say rejection is the norm, and it’s
true that most of it will be out of your control—and is thus not worth worrying
about at all. That doesn’t mean we get out of mitigating what of the process is within our control.

So, here’s an intro to how I’m starting to
see stories.

When I studied engineering, I did these
cool (I thought) reactor simulations. You would have a bunch of fixed “initial
conditions” that you would feed to your reactor model—temperature, pressure,
concentration of reactants etc—then you would let the simulation run and it
would tell you how the mixture of components in the reactor changed over a
week, month etc, and what you were left with at the end. If you set up the
model properly, and provided enough initial conditions, and those conditions
were correct, cool—you’re done, write it up. What was more likely, at least on
the first attempt of a new simulation, is that the thing would come up with a
bunch of error messages. You didn’t set enough boundaries, so the simulation
returned an impossible solution.

Some simulations I had to
do were 2D cross-sections of reactors. When they were done, they’d show, for
example, how concentrated various particles were in different regions. The
images looked like thermal imaging, showing pockets of red where the particles
concentrated, the swirls of eddies coming off them diluting into an un-mixed
blue. The images would look rough at first, but I’d set the simulation to
perform 1000 iterations of the same calculation, over and over, until the image
became clearer.

The reason the simulations
had to be repeated over and over was because the calculations they used were
just approximations of what might happen in real life. Nature by comparison is
so complex that it could only be approximated, in these cases, by calculations.

And the calculations had
ways of measuring how much error their images contained. Rules of thumb told me
what size of error was acceptable in order for me to trust the image I was
seeing. I could decide if that was good enough for me and move onto the next
simulation, or if it was worth my time setting up the simulation to run for a
further 1000 iterations.

In this analogy, the reactor simulation is
your subconscious. The initial conditions, the components you feed to it, are
the components of story: plot, characterisation, setting, theme. The story is a
meaning-generating system.

Any story can be corrected, but those
stories that are set up best at the beginning will have the least error
messages. Also, it may be the case that you run it once and it comes out
perfectly—but whether it does or not is more likely a case of guesswork than a
question of your skills as a storyteller/scientist. Sometimes I’ve gotten lucky
and guessed it all almost correctly.
But very rarely. And is that the point, really? No. The point is good results,
not how they are obtained.

Scientists have hypotheses: what they
expect to happen. Similarly, I’d advise preparing a rough plot outline. You
haven’t killed your creativity if you end up right, or close to right. It just
means that you’re a good scientist!

It’s perfectly legitimate
to send a short story out if you determine that one fix might take another
month’s worth of work, say, but add very little to the overall picture. No
matter what anyone claims, no story is perfect. Maybe one definition of
perfection would be, “A dead-on match for what would happen in real life.” And
there’s no way of knowing that, but there are damn good ways of approximating
it. And like my simulations, approximations are good enough for their purposes.

The point of story, I
think, is that it’s so close to life that it’s good enough. Maybe even scarily
accurate. But never perfect. So close to the truth that it resonates with
people you’ve never met.

So this part is just me
setting up my analogy. In upcoming blog posts, I’ll outline how the way I write
applies this way of looking at story.

You can follow this process without liking
my analogy. You can even write something good without following this process,
but I bet it would take you longer. It sure took me longer without it! I’ve
found it’s best to do this stuff up front because you won’t get out of doing it
later.

So I hope you enjoy these
posts, which I’ve scheduled to release this week and next!

Madeleine Swann and Gary Buller return for new Losing the Plot!

Listen here!

In a Losing the Plot first, two guests return for a triple-chat catch up! We talk YouTube drama, markets for submissions, BizarroCon and more!

Madeleine Swann’s “Fortune Box” will be out with Eraserhead Press on the 1stof June. Info on her website here.

Gary Buller’s latest stories can be found here and here, and his website is here.

As always, if you’re a reader, writer, creative type, someone with something to say, you can always get in touch with me using losingtheplotpodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. I look forward to hearing from you!

Intro music provided by Marshall Riley. Check out his latest album, “Bummer”, at Captain Crook Records!

New Losing the Plot, with A.A. Medina!

Listen here!

A.A. Medina is the author of the novella “Siphon”, a “vampire story without the vampire”, out now with Hindered Souls Press; and also the short story collection “ITCH.” He and Dustin Schyler Yoak are the co-owners of Aphotic Realm, a literary magazine for strange and sinister stories. Issue 3, “Classified”, comes out in March. He also designs and develops tabletop games for MoonMarketGames.

Amongst many other things, we talk about punk, loss, and celebrating the success of others! (And if you listen to the very end, his punk band Kama-Mara play us out with their song, “Antipathy”! It’s super cool!!)

Find “Siphon” here:

https://www.amazon.com/Siphon-Medina/dp/0692980210/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1518968695&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=siphon+medina

“ITCH” here:

https://www.amazon.com/ITCH-Collection-Short-Stories-Medina-ebook/dp/B0793LVYL1/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518968728&sr=8-1&keywords=itch++medina

“Aphotic Realm” here:

http://aphoticrealm.com/

Check out his website here:

https://uglyandhorrible.wordpress.com/

As always, if you’re a reader, writer, creative type, someone with something to say, you can always get in touch with me using losingtheplotpodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. I look forward to hearing from you!

Intro music provided by Marshall Riley. Check out his latest album, “Bummer”, at Captain Crook Records!

captaincrookrecords.bandcamp.com/album/bummer

New Losing the Plot, with Joe Ponepinto!

Listen here!

Joe Ponepinto is the founding publisher and fiction editor of Tahoma Literary Review, a nationally recognized literary journal that has had selections reproduced in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, Best Small Fictions, and other notable anthologies. He is the winner of the Tiferet: Literature, Art & the Creative Spirit 2016 fiction contest, and has had stories published in dozens of literary journals in the U.S. and abroad. A New Yorker by birth, he has lived in a variety of locations around the country, and now resides in Washington State with his wife, Dona, and Henry the coffee-drinking dog.

We talk about his comedic political satire novel, “Mr Neutron” (out in March from 7.13 Books), literary magazines, and sugardaddy courses for creative writers.

Find “Mr Neutron” here:
www.amazon.com/Mr-Neutron-Joe-Po…nto/dp/0998409243

Check out his website here:
joeponepinto.com/

As always, if you’re a reader, writer, creative type, someone with something to say, you can always get in touch with me using losingtheplotpodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. I look forward to hearing from you!

Intro music provided by Marshall Riley. Check out his latest album, “Bummer”, at Captain Crook Records!
captaincrookrecords.bandcamp.com/album/bummer