The Editing Process

I’ve been at this full time writing thing for a little over 2 months now and I have plenty to show for it; 7 completed stories is not too bad at all I think. They cover a decent range of plot and theme and there’s even a little genre variety thrown in for good measure. They’re all first draft though, and that’s a problem.

I think it’s time to shift gears into phase 2 of this project, and that is beginning the editing process.

This doesn’t let me off the hook with writing. I still have to post every single day, and for WIP500, I still have to write a minimum of 500 words a day, though that’s 500 a day on average.

The problem of the editing process has occupied the back of my mind since I finished the first story back at the beginning of NaNoWriMo. The second problem of how to integrate the editing process into the writing process without stopping the writing has occupied another corner of my mind since near the end of NaNoWriMo when I was beginning to build up a decent backlog of work.

I think I’m just going to make it a very simple and straight-forward system. I’m trying to write in public as much as possible, and I’d like to do the same with editing wherever possible too. Every day I’ll put up a post about how the editing is going, what I’ve been changing in a given story and why, the direction I’m trying to take it in. This will stop me from posting 5000 different drafts of each story. I may still post significant draft updates though, if people are interested in seeing them.

Feedback Requested

This editing process is where I’m going to be most in need of feedback from my readers, and that begins with suggestions on how I could be doing better in presenting material.

Some time back during NaNoWriMo someone on Google+ suggested that it was a pain to read things online and then have to email me or leave a comment in order to provide feedback, and that I might want to make my work available in eBook formats, as PDFs, etc. I thought this was a pretty good idea; I don’t know that it’ll make giving me feedback any easier, but it will certainly make it easier for you to read and that can only be a good thing.

Formats

I’ll be spending some time over the next day or so doing exactly that. Everything will still be available in the blog of course, but I’ll be making .mobi, .epub and .pdf versions of the first drafts available for download.

Once this is done, I’d love to hear what you think about it.

I’d also love suggestions on other things I could be doing to make things easier or better.

The Future

One idea I’ve been kicking around in the back of my head is to borrow a page from Scott Sigler’s book, so to speak, and release audiobook readings. This would, of course, only occur after a story was all edited and finished.

I’ve never done any kind of long term reading like that, but it’s at least something I could try, as an experiment. See how people like it, if I’m any good at it, what the response is, etc.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I’d love your feedback; please feel free to leave comments on the blog or stories, or to email me, or to get back to me on Twitter at @fictionimprob, or at my Google+ profile at http://gplus.to/GordMcLeod. Hope to hear from you all soon!

That Awkward 'Between Stories' Feeling

So yesterday I finished off The Price of Independence, after 26 days working on it. And those 26 days don’t count the several days I wrote other things instead. In all I spent more than a month on that one story. That’s as long as it took me to write all the other Prices stories together.

That’s okay, stories are done when they’re done. The problem then becomes what to do next?

Instead of having something known to go back to and work on, I’m left with a blank canvas, a world without boundaries. I can write everything, which too often means I can write nothing. So I start looking for ways to narrow things down.

I admit it… Since the start of November, I’ve hit up tvtropes.com more than a few times. Their Story Generator is a great means of doing two things.

1: It can give you valuable sparks of inspiration that serve as catalysts for new ideas that give you new directions to explore.

2: It can be an evil time suck that keeps you from writing anything for days.

Obviously I try for #1.

I visited TVTropes again today when the time came to do my writing, and one of the very first that came up is something that’s been pinging around inside my head for a long time; years in fact. Not so much a whole story idea as a setting; I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic fiction, and would like to try my hand at some fairly soon.

On the other hand, the pseudo-Christmas story I wrote over the holidays was set in the far future in what could be argued as post-apocalyptic Earth, so maybe I already have. It was fun to write too, as a mini-break from the proto-steampunk of Prices. Some more straight up sci-fi might be fun to get into.

That’s the other thing I do to come up with new ideas; your current writing is your most fertile ground for new concepts, whether they’re directly related to your current projects or not. Prices is a good example of that. I had only the roughest, most primitive ideas of what I wanted from that series of stories when I began writing The Price of Independence back in October. As I wrote it and then set it aside to write the others in November, ideas came to me faster and more readily as the fiction informed my thinking, metaphorically speaking to me and telling me which ideas to explore next.

Ultimately I think that’s the best source of new ideas, but you’ll still find me browsing TV tropes now and then. Send a rescue team if I’m there longer than a week though!

More on Prices:

I originally envisioned Prices as the title of a book, with the six stories I’ve written making up the book once they’re all done. I’ve been wondering lately though if maybe Prices is more of a series name and each of the stories should be more of a novella-length piece in the series. Either way I go with Prices, the six existing stories are not the end. I can and will write more in that series, and soon I’ll need another new lead character.

2011 is Dead. Long Live 2012.

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As I write this, 2011 is drawing to a close and none too soon. A lot of things about this year have been pretty fantastic, most notably the founding of this site, but in many other ways this has been a year I’ll be happy to forget.

2012 is 45 minutes away, so I’m taking this chance to think about what I want to accomplish in the year ahead with some resolutions.

Reading

Photo by Adokos/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The first of my resolutions for 2012 is reading. I will once again participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge, but I will not be setting a goal of 100 books this time. 30 books will be fine to start, and I can update that higher if I finish too early. It’s been months since I dared read a long book, and I miss them.

On the positive side, I DID finish my 100 book challenge for 2011! I had to read 9 books over the 30th and 31st of December to do it, and obviously they were very short books, but I did it legitimately and it feels pretty awesome.

Writing

Photo by Adokos/Flickr (Creative Commons)

I have two writing resolutions.

The first: I will take part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again come November. And I will win again.

The second: I will take part in WIP500, a new challenge to write 183,000 words over the course of the year by writing a minimum of 500 words every day. (2012 is a leap year, for those who did the math and wondered how 500 times 365 equals 183,000.)

The nice thing about doing both is that WIP500 counts any words you write for NaNoWriMo, so if you manage to stick to at least 500 words a day on average right up to November and then go on to do your 1,667 a day for NaNoWriMo, you’ll finish WIP500 before you even finish NaNoWriMo, let alone before year’s end.

I have a bonus third not-quite-resolution that I need to investigate but hope to implement, which I’m stealing from Judith Graves, who in turn got it from Scott Myers. It’s a progress chart that will probably help a whole lot with my progress on finishing Prices.

Speaking of finishing Prices:

Publishing

My final resolution is to publish 4 things in the Amazon Kindle store and hopefully other fine eBook vendors like the Nook store and the Apple iBooks store.

Happy New Year everyone! Hope 2012 is far better than 2011 was regardless of how well 2011 went for you.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is a Writing Inspiration

I’ve done many types of writing over the course of my life including many types of fiction and non-fiction. Some of the most fascinating writing I’ve ever had to do was in video games.

I’ve written before about how oddly liberating writing under constraints can be, and game writing is some of the most restrained writing you’ll ever have to do.

Lately I’ve been playing Bioware’s new Star Wars: The Old Republic game. It’s an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game) similar to World of Warcraft in many respects, which I was never really a big fan of.

Bioware, however, is well known among gamers for the incredible quality of the storytelling in their games. The problem was that they weren’t known for multi-player games; mostly they created epic-scale games with incredible stories that you play through on your own.

It’s long been hoped that they would be able to bring a richness of story to MMOs that has so far been lacking. They met my hopes, and then exceeded them. Not only did they craft stories (multiple, yes) that are as good as those found in their other games, they’ve done unique story lines for different types of characters you might play, different decision paths you as the player may head down, and most impressively at all, they’ve included some stories called Flashpoints that accommodate several players at once.

The general complexity of these multi-player conversations is nothing I’d think of as out of the ordinary. During the course of a conversation, the character your group of friends is talking to will speak. (And in The Old Republic, they really do speak. The amount of voice acting in the game is astounding, and of incredibly high quality.)

Mass Effect, another Bioware game featuring fantastic voice acting.

After they’ve said their piece though, you’ll inevitably come to a decision point. This is where in a typical solo game you’d choose what your character says, and the game goes on from there, telling you what the reaction is depending on how you act. Generally you have several possible ways to react to any decision point - a “good” option and a “bad” option, and sometimes a middle-of-the-road option.

That’s exactly what happens here too, in multi-player flashpoints, with several big differences I’ve never encountered before.

If you are playing along with 2 other people and they’re both part of the conversation, all of you decide what you want your individual character to say. All 3 characters are present as a group talking to the game character.

Once you’ve all picked your dialogue option, the game “rolls the dice” for you and assigns you a number.

Once ALL of you have picked your dialogue options and have your numbers, the game decides which character speaks. The rule seems to be highest number gets to speak, and in the case of a tie, the one who chose their option fastest speaks.

Game dialogue has come a LONG way from these days.

I can’t express well enough just how unique and exhilarating it was to have conversations like this in a game where I wasn’t in complete control over what happened. It lead to me seeing dialogue options I wouldn’t otherwise have seen, which was fantastic; it felt like a much more living, breathing conversation where you’re not just talking to a computer. It felt much more alive. It was hard to believe such a simple mechanic could provide such a huge benefit.

Context is everything when writing dialogue, whether it’s in a book or a video game. I often find myself falling into the habit of just writing dialogue lines straight out, with little or no context. So far everything I’ve got up in the other sections are first drafts, so that’s okay. Star Wars: The Old Republic has reminded me to make sure I have good context for any conversation.