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story This is taking forever

It's always a challenge navigating my house without setting foot in front of a mirror. So it stands to reason that from time to time I find myself in a hurry, for one reason or another, and inadvertently stagger into view of one of the terrifying interdimensional portals. Barely a moment of opportunity need pass before the alternate universe Nate, on his eternal quest to rid me of hypocrisy, would appear in the mirror, and ask some targeted question designed to reveal a flaw in my thinking. Earlier in the week, such an encounter took place.

While searching for a spare mechanical toothbrush head, I inadvertently glanced into the mirror. Finding myself suddenly face to face with this gruesome inquisitor, I tried unsuccessfully to avert my gaze in time, but it was too late. "Pop Quiz hotshot: write a full length book that's better than the ones you make fun of online, or admit to yourself that you couldn't do any better." Instantly my mind fabricated some quick one liners, defensive quips that would free me from the hassle of acknowledging the validity of the shadowy figure's impeccable logic. Instead of rattling them off though, I was frozen, paralyzed by the inescapable gauntlet of reasoning.

"Of course I can write a 250 page novel of decent quality, anyone could do that, you simply have to avoid all those tiny things I pick at in other people's writing" I replied with confidence, but I knew I was in trouble. Nothing is ever as easy as it looks, and as to whether I could actually do better than the writers I picked apart, well, there was only one way to find out.

So I started writing the novel, and this is taking forever. I'm 3 days in and only have 70 pages, and probably every third one will have to be completely rewritten. And then I had to open up a whole new project just to keep track of all the stuff going on in the writing project, because I can't memorize 50 fictional characters names in 3 days. Anyway, the book is actually turning out ok, but this is really going to take a lot of work to be any good. I think probably a whole month.

The whole thing is a senseless pain in the ass, but I'm really driven to get back to criticizing episodes of Nash Bridges and other such popular works of literature. Who knew writing a book was so much work?
 
I was on the point of pointing out that we were told that AI was going to kill off our creativity when ... :hi:

Having an andriod research assistant is making this like 100x faster. I'm writing a part, and I'm thinking, lets have this scene take place in a suburb of Savannah. And so I go over to chat GPT, and type in ... "what is the standard operating procedure for a district attorney's office when filing a criminal case"

Good research is so important to writing, and having a tool where you can research fast and in one place is a huge help.

But, and here's where the creativity comes in: GPT will deliver you the officially proscribed SOP in all its clinical precision. End of research. Next plot point please.

A real writer, or even a writer's assistant, if they're serious about understanding the process, will spend a day or two, maybe even a week, shadowing someone in the DA's office, so that they don't just learn the officially described SOP, but also get to see the numerous glitches, hiccups, workarounds, errors, pointless stupidities, and potential ( ... wait for it ... ) plot-twisting creative opportunities that sprout from the margins of the SOP.
 
I was on the point of pointing out that we were told that AI was going to kill off our creativity when ... :hi:



But, and here's where the creativity comes in: GPT will deliver you the officially proscribed SOP in all its clinical precision. End of research. Next plot point please.

A real writer, or even a writer's assistant, if they're serious about understanding the process, will spend a day or two, maybe even a week, shadowing someone in the DA's office, so that they don't just learn the officially described SOP, but also get to see the numerous glitches, hiccups, workarounds, errors, pointless stupidities, and potential ( ... wait for it ... ) plot-twisting creative opportunities that sprout from the margins of the SOP.
Well, I take your point, because I make your same point to people about casting. You do get a better result when you're willing to dig deeper, and put in actual effort.

I think it's a bit hyperbolic to completely dismiss basic research though, because the quality of the source material you need in situation X is entirely dependent on the resolution it needs to be integrated at.

Let's say a character goes to the post office in a scene, and I need a ballpark number for how much they would be charged. It's 3 lines in the book. "that afternoon she dropped by the post office. The man at the desk quickly weighed the package and said "that will be $7.43 please""

In that case, there is really no need for me to buy a pair of binoculars and rent a hotel room across from the post office. The scene only required a bit of missing information to be correct, and I can grab that online easily. If the entire book was about what it was like working at the post office, then I think spending weeks around the crew there would very likely help create a more insightful story.

Popular use of AI is still very much in it's fetal stage, and I imagine many people will misuse it, and generate uncountable piles of garbage, but a smarter segment of writers and creators will be able to understand when to use it, and when not to use it. I would ask "is that actually so different than what we saw before AI?" Some people understood uncompromising work, and some didn't, and we may be swapping out tools, or methods, but I feel like the core issue is still with the creator, and their level of commitment to excellence.

But that's not the end of the issue. I was looking at statistics for published authors, and I don't mean self published authors. The average gross income from a published novel in 2022 is....... 5000 dollars. So when you're talking about rewriting a novel 3 times and spending a year fighting tooth and nail for one child sized paycheck, I would say that there is at least a valid argument for cutting the occasional corner.

So let's say I just go directly by the numbers, and I'm doing this work for a 12% chance of 5 grand. That's 600 dollars. So from an ROI perspective, I think that substituting artificial research for the real thing makes quite a bit of sense.
 
Sounds like a sure fire way for me to produce a steaming pile of shit and then end up with a polished turd
Seems like kind of an impolite response to a well intentioned bit of advice. But then I don't really have much room to talk. I think James had a valid suggestion here. Steven King did indeed put out some work of questionable quality over the years, but he also wrote The Shining, Shawshank, and IT, so I feel like there is value in his insights.
 
I get ya...
But I disagree with you, Sean. I think everyone has a story in them worth telling. You too.
Talented writers can write about anything. I believe that. The rest of us can still write but I think it has to be about something we care about. Something that means something to us. I mean, I could never write about life in the 18th century. At best it would be contrived, but I can write about aliens and monsters and crap like that because it really interests me.
 
But that's not the end of the issue. I was looking at statistics for published authors, and I don't mean self published authors. The average gross income from a published novel in 2022 is....... 5000 dollars. So when you're talking about rewriting a novel 3 times and spending a year fighting tooth and nail for one child sized paycheck, I would say that there is at least a valid argument for cutting the occasional corner.

So let's say I just go directly by the numbers, and I'm doing this work for a 12% chance of 5 grand. That's 600 dollars. So from an ROI perspective, I think that substituting artificial research for the real thing makes quite a bit of sense.

Alternatively, that average might be dragged down to 5000 dollars by a huge number of middling novels churned out by authors aiming to meet a words-per-day deadline, or relying on Wikipedia as their main source of background info. Going by the numbers, like that, is turning the creative process into an industrial service. It'd be like a talented teenage football player seeing that the average pay for an adult football player a few thousand a year, and deciding there's no point training five days a week. What are the chances, then, that that teen will be spotted and taken on by on of the really big teams and earn millions?

Your postage stamp example doesn't exactly make your point for you either. If I want to know the price of a stamp, I can find it with three clicks on our local postal service's website (and similarly for just about any other country's mail). There's not a lot of intelligence - artificial or otherwise - needed to robotically churn out answers to specific questions.
 
“That's not writing, that's typing.”

- Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac
Funny quote.

personally i wouldn't go so far as to disparage anyone elses writing method.
theres plenty of great experienced authors that write that way, i just don't have the intelligence or experience or whatever to pull it off.

I'll start with a half baked idea that needs to be massaged into something good... if i just ran with it before massaging, it would be a disaster.
 
Alternatively, that average might be dragged down to 5000 dollars by a huge number of middling novels churned out by authors aiming to meet a words-per-day deadline, or relying on Wikipedia as their main source of background info. Going by the numbers, like that, is turning the creative process into an industrial service. It'd be like a talented teenage football player seeing that the average pay for an adult football player a few thousand a year, and deciding there's no point training five days a week. What are the chances, then, that that teen will be spotted and taken on by on of the really big teams and earn millions?


There's more than one way to look at it. The distribution is no doubt skewed. They all are. It's probably a pretty standard curve

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The other way to look at it would be to understand that the numbers don't actually lie, even if they don't mean what they seem to mean on superficial inspection. In fact, I expect the situation is more dire for most applicants, rather than less.


Here's a video I watched during some research. I didn't learn anything from it, because I already knew how society works. It's just this little story about a moron in an authority position doubtless put there by another moron in an authority position finding all the smart people, throwing them out of the process, so that only the voices of morons could be heard. This little story is politics and art and academia and law in microcosm. Are there any people that can think independently? Ok, all of you get out! Finally, now we can hear from the "real people"
 
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So I started writing the novel, and this is taking forever. I'm 3 days in and only have 70 pages, and probably every third one will have to be completely rewritten. And then I had to open up a whole new project just to keep track of all the stuff going on in the writing project, because I can't memorize 50 fictional characters names in 3 days. Anyway, the book is actually turning out ok, but this is really going to take a lot of work to be any good. I think probably a whole month.

You're 69 pages ahead of me, so keep it up!
 
Ok, so update on this. I was out of commission for a while due to some medical issues, but had been working on this book whenever I felt well enough to do so.

Yesterday I finished the book. But I'm maybe 30% of the way done.

First off, I'd like to say that it appears that writing a novel is at least 3x as hard as I originally envisioned. Maybe 5x. lol. Sometimes it feels super easy, and then there are parts that are dramatically harder.

So I read from many different sources about what constitutes a legitimate novel. Aggregated from those sources, here is my summary.

Minimum level Jr Novel for kids with short attention spans - 50,000 words

Starting Writer's "My first Novel" - 70,000 words

A regular novel - 80-120,000 words

a veteran writers epic novel - up to 500,000 words.

So you can imagine my annoyance when I finished the rough draft of my story, which was intended to be a "real novel" and found it to be only 38,000 words long, or as the literary community would apparently call it. "a very long magazine article"

So I think this thing needs at least 2-3 rewrites, where I'll need to both tighten and expand the story, and then really polish it. I'm targeting 80,000 words, "the minimum to be taken seriously" and basically, it looks like this will take quite a bit of work to get there.

I feel a bit stuck right now, because I've completed the main story arc, and while there is plenty that I can add, doubling the size of the book without adding any filler feels like quite a task. Plus, this was just supposed to be a quick side project, to kind of get in shape for writing sections of "The Labyrinth".

It's good brain exercise anyway, and I'm actually finding the process of this fun and interesting.
 
I feel a bit stuck right now, because I've completed the main story arc, and while there is plenty that I can add, doubling the size of the book without adding any filler feels like quite a task.
I feel you :)

My usual approach in this situation is to look for characters that I can develop further. Who is interesting but hasn't been explored in depth? Who can confront other challenges that relate to but are separate from the main plot? And what challenges have been dealt with more brusquely than they really deserve?

Good luck!
 
I feel you :)

My usual approach in this situation is to look for characters that I can develop further. Who is interesting but hasn't been explored in depth? Who can confront other challenges that relate to but are separate from the main plot? And what challenges have been dealt with more brusquely than they really deserve?

Good luck!
There's some low hanging fruit I can use to fill in some bulk, and that's what I've been going for first, but I think your advice is good. Makes sense. I think a lot of how I see ideal plot complexity comes from movies. I've read a lot, but in recent decades I've watched 15 movies for every book I've read. So now it feels kind of bloated to me when I try to write too many "plot tangents", and I seem to gravitate towards one strong central plot.

I feel like I'm bad at, or at least disinterested in "B stories". The current build has a few already, but I'm struggling to make them independently interesting in comparison to the central plot. I had a really clear vision for what the main plot should be, but I'm kind of just improvising the subplots.

Anyway, I'm gaining valuable experience, and learning my strengths and weaknesses by going through the process. I don't regret trying this out, except that it's more of a time commitment than I was really expecting.
 
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Pretty cool you already have a first draft. And the fact that you actually enjoy writing is surprising.
To me it's like smashing my head against a wall.

Maybe you should focus more on being a writer for your future?
How many feature length scripts have you written?
 
Pretty cool you already have a first draft. And the fact that you actually enjoy writing is surprising.
To me it's like smashing my head against a wall.

Maybe you should focus more on being a writer for your future?
How many feature length scripts have you written?
The process of just writing down an idea or scene that's already clear in my head is very easy and natural to me, so that part is no problem. It's the sophistication of the larger orchestration that really slows me down. Mainly trying to make everything take up the correct ratios, and determining what adjacent areas of the story do or don't need to be extrapolated. One aspect may be more interesting to write about, such as a murder inside a prison, but it can't take up a disproportionate amount of time, or it starts slowing down the progression of the main plot.

IDK, I probably just need a few thousand hours of real life experience. Thinking only gets you so far. I'll finish this, and let the 20/20 of hindsight do the heavy lifting for me.

No need to shift focus, to me, it's all part of one big thing. Everything I'm doing is just some aspect of telling a story, so it made sense to stop and do a hard reality check on how well I could put together a larger story. Also, SP, once completed, has an exponentially higher profit ceiling than any book I could write, so there's that aspect. I'll tell you what shift I'm really thinking about, though there are some serious negatives. After some time with the PSVR 2, seeing where VR tech is at today, I actually really want to just port the whole project over to VR, and make it the first long format interactive film in Stereoscopic surround. It's already in the required format anyway, but vr market share is still a problem for developers like me.

I wrote a few back in the early days, one for Deathworld, adapted from the Harrison Novel, and a couple of others that were probably not great quality. I wrote the script for that nature film I did a few years ago. Anyway, nothing of any real significance I would say. I was always so certain that I could do it, that I never felt much need to prove it to myself. Still, I knew that that wasn't a valid answer, so I started writing this so I'd know for certain.

I've learned a good bit about my capabilities and limitations already, and at the end of the day, I still don't think I'll have that much trouble when I need to write scripts for SP. At 149 pages, I've told an interesting story, and now I just need to work on expanding my skills to create something more professional.

The lazy side of me is thinking, "you should cut this down to a 100 page script instead of building it up to a 300 page novel", but I feel like I'll learn more if I just go ahead and do it the hard way.

In case anyone is wondering, this book is a bit of a departure from my usual high concept sci fi stuff. I'd describe it as "What would happen if Kevin Williamson wrote a John Grisham novel" lol.
 
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You've been working on save point for a couple years now right?
Yeah there is some great potential there but people like George RR Martin and JK Rowling have done pretty well as authors, i mean damn how much money do you need if that isn't good enough lol.

The way you're writing, you spent 2.5 weeks so far?
lets say you are half way there or even 1/3 of the way there.

that means you will have a finished, proofread novel in 5-7.5 weeks.
104 weeks in two years mean you could have written fourteen or twenty novels

in no time at all you'd be an accomplished author with dozens of works.

I've switched to writing in screenplay format and then i'll convert to novel format afterward..
I was like a baby lost in the woods trying to write in novel format, i had none of my instincts working for me...

spent like a decade developing my editors instinct to keep a screenplay moving, so I'm going to rely on that to get me moving.
up to 37 pages since I was able to get everything down stuff I've been thinking of, but still, i am on the path of years to even one book.

seems like you have a lot of aptitude you should lean into
 
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when I finished the rough draft of my story, which was intended to be a "real novel" and found it to be only 38,000 words long, or as the literary community would apparently call it. "a very long magazine article"
Back in the day, when I was studying English Literature we called that a "short story" and our coursework was packed full of them, often collected into anthologies, sometimes even being a series of stories by the same author.

And later, as I took an interest in the adaptation of the printed word to the Big Screen, I saw that "short stories" were generally a much better fit for the 90-ish minute attention span of the cinematic audience - far less material to cut out of the 100-500k-word No.1-Best-Seller-Now-A-Major-Movie. And fewer people complaining that the screen adaptation had butchered the original story.

If you feel that you've written a work that is complete in itself, that reads well, is internally coherent, and is essentially "finished" then leave it at that and move on to a new idea. Perhaps, in a few weeks or months, you'll reach a point in another story where you suddenly realise you can create a seamless bridge between that one and this. Or not - in which case you'll have two potential movies rather than one.
 
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