Comments on: Writing chat with Jay Lake

By: archangelbeth

archangelbeth — Fri, 05 May 2006 12:32:35 +0000

I have a small file of “things that I cut from my other story/stories” — because I, sadly, sometimes love my own prose too much to lose it entirely, even if it’s bad. (Although I re-read my old Mary Sue-esque stories from way back, and… I had a turn of phrase here and there that wasn’t bad at all. Heh.)

It helps ease the pain if I know the words still live somewhere, in retirement.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Thu, 04 May 2006 19:08:20 +0000

1. this is fantastic. thanks for posting it.

2. ok, so i have never heard of flash fiction. i write what i call “fragments” sometimes, but this sounds more On Purpose. i’ll google around about this, but in the meantime if anyone has more specific info at hand on this, i’d love to read it.

i’m going to reread this post a few times. i have been trying unsuccessfully to get past the Editing As I’m Writing thing, and i’m not even an editor. but i *am* slowly learning, if for no other reason than it is incredibly painful to have worked on something for a long time and basically gotten nowhere with it.

thanks again – jonvon

By: deannahoak

deannahoak — Wed, 03 May 2006 16:43:35 +0000

Yeah, and um…how’d you do that, btw? :-)

By: deannahoak

deannahoak — Wed, 03 May 2006 16:33:21 +0000

I don’t mind if you link to my blog, but I’d prefer that you do not reprint the post in its entirety.

Thanks for asking!

By: anonymous

anonymous — Wed, 03 May 2006 11:31:17 +0000

Interesting. I’ve always had to have some semblance of a plot before I start actually writing. That seems to help. Knowing the end helps me drive there from the beginning.

But then there’s the problem with getting plot or premise ideas. Sometimes I’ll think of something but it’s only an idea, not a story. If I can’t come up with a plot, I’ll just write something. Usually, this leads to what I call a “misfire”, something that’s not revisable. These I put away to look at later.

–Steve J

By: dr_pretentious

dr_pretentious — Wed, 03 May 2006 07:57:22 +0000

I keep a master file called “Half-Abandoned Bits” and keep excerpts from all my projects there. A nice sentence about a sunset can migrate from the epic fantasy in some other world to the magical realist comedies on the Jersey shore, and all I have to do is run a search on the word “sunset.”

Before the age of word processing, the poet Ted Roethke used to keep a fishbowl by his desk. One of his revision methods was to take a razor to his drafts, cutting each line to its own slice of page, and then to arrange the lines into their best possible order. Any lines that didn’t make it into the poem he was working on, he put in the fishbowl. If he sat down to write and nothing came to him, or he got stuck halfway through writing something, he’d just reach into the fishbowl for an abandoned line and see what he could do with it. That famous line with the sidelong pickerel smile migrated from poem to poem before landed in the elegy for his student.

Never throw anything away.

By: readwrite

readwrite — Wed, 03 May 2006 07:27:24 +0000

I, too, have this problem, as well as many other issues of love/hate with writing.

//insert 45-minute self-pitying psychiatric rant//

And I, too, hope to wrok them out in time and move past them.

By: barbarienne

barbarienne — Wed, 03 May 2006 06:55:41 +0000

I don’t know whether to be more boggled at how useful this conversation is, or that you were having it at 7:30 in the morning.

By: quasipsyco

quasipsyco — Wed, 03 May 2006 06:05:14 +0000

There’s a group on-line that I have participated in that does Flash Fiction Challenges.

On Friday (though sometimes as early as Thursday) a trigger is provided.
Members log in and access the trigger. At the moment a member views the trigger the count down starts. They have 90 minutes to write (and edit) whatever story idea comes to mind. Before the 90 minutes the member submits the story.

The trigger is available until Sunday night. Monday, the stories are divided into groups and posted anonymously. At that point people who see their story in one group go critique the other group’s stories and then vote for their favorite stories in one of several “Best” categories.

It is a great way to have spontaneous ideas and provides wonderful “butt in chair” time for the writers.

If you are interested, let me know.

By: jaylake

jaylake — Wed, 03 May 2006 05:05:37 +0000

Ah, but you sir have subjugated your internal editor to your writing process (as I think has as well, for example). A terrible master but a wonderful servant.