Writing Update: Lessons - February 19, 2023 (close enough)

Apologies for the late entry. This week got away from me.

I am learning. Here is what I have learned.

#1 - I don't think I should read and write the same genre at the same time in the future. I'm writing 'The Ice Bowl' and reading 'Leviathan Wakes' at the same time. I'm having a lot of issues in finding my own voice because of the influence from the other story. I don't have the best memory so if I pull inspiration from a story it's usually only in small parts. When I'm actively reading a story there's too much available for me to easily grab. I think in the future I will stick to writing in genres that I'm not currently reading so that if I'm inspired by another story it's only in small parts and of the most memorable parts.

#2 - I need to read my dialogue out loud. I've known this for a while but I just forgot about it, looking back at some of my dialogue now it's impossible to believe that it came out of a person's mouth. I will be focusing on dialogue more and especially having it be realistic/believable.

#3 - Outlines. 'The Ice Bowl' outline is turning out to be practically useless. All the things that I used to my benefit in 'The Artist' are slowing me down on this story. I still see the value in outlines though I think I need to focus in on what I get out of them so that I don't waste time and energy outlining things that don't make sense to me. Specifically, character outlines are great and having a clear beginning and ending of each Act is helpful so that I know each will be interesting. This lets me worry about making the middle interesting when I'm writing.

#4 - Sci-Fi is hard. Concise Sci-Fi is an art form that I am a complete novice in. It's a good thing that I'm writing some now so that I could find that out. It feels like there is so much necessary background info that you have to end up doing exposition dumps. Finding the balance between essential and boring is going to be a challenge, most likely this is something that I would work out in the rewrites. This contributes to my next lesson as well

#5 - I'm writing too much. Specifically, too many words. My short stories are turning into novellas if not full blown novels. I need to be able to write one story a week if I want the benefits of a quick feedback loop. I'm going to give my current project the respect I feel it deserves but after that I'm going to put forward a conscious effort to not let me stories get bloated. I will have plenty of time to write Epic Fantasy in the future. More details to follow in Friday's blog post, for now I'll just say that you can expect the final version of "The Ice Bowl' this Sunday, Feb 26th

That's it for now, thanks for your patience