story This is taking forever

[Nate North]

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?

 

[mlesemann]

I started writing plays 'cause my husband got tired of listening to me complain about the ones other people wrote.

 

[sfoster]

this is taking forever. I'm 3 days in

Sounds like youre doing great to me. orders of magnitude more productive.

 

[Nate North]

Well, keep in mind that I had originally envisioned just throwing something together, and then was blindsided completely out of nowhere when google informed me that one had to write literally tens of thousands of words to qualify as a novelist. That's literally 4-5 of my indietalk posts, back to back. No person could be expected to survive such an ordeal, either as writer or reader.

 

[Nate North]

bug: this gif i posted only shows up in the edit.

Sounds like youre doing great to me. orders of magnitude more productive.

I kind of got into it, and decided not to sleep for a while. I'm probably going to wake up and realize I've just been writing "all work and no play make jack a dull boy" over and over, lol.

 

[sfoster]

I kind of got into it, and decided not to sleep for a while. I'm probably going to wake up and realize I've just been writing "all work and no play make jack a dull boy" over and over, lol.

I started in may 2022 and I have 17 pages, like I said before I don't really have what it takes to be a serious writer.
We all move at our own pace i suppose. 4 of those months were spent on other ventures, so at least I'm still writing.

 

[Nate North]

I started in may 2022 and I have 17 pages, like I said before I don't really have what it takes to be a serious writer.
We all move at our own pace i suppose. 4 of those months were spent on other ventures, so at least I'm still writing.

I'm sure yours has a lot more thought and detail than mine does, I'm speedrunning it just to try and get something out the door before my enthusiasm dies down and I wander off to some other thing like trying to become a skiball champion. I think George RR Martin finishes like one page every leap year, and people consider him a serious writer, so I wouldn't be too hard on myself over the page count.

I was looking up studies of how many people that took a serious shot at getting published actually made it, and was really surprised to find out that it was something like 12% (as long as you keep mailing out copies day and night until they offer you a deal just to get you to stop, lol) That's way higher than I expected.

 

[sfoster]

Looks like game of thrones took 5 years and harry potter took 6 years.
Rowling definitely got faster with the later books.

Imagine trying to hire a ghost writer and then 4 years later you still don't have a book?

https://i.insider.com/57c872e3dd089575378b4910

 

[Nate North]

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, "list and characterize the suburbs of Savannah Ga, and give details on the population and economy of each area" or "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. It will also spellcheck and grammar check any text you give it.

It doesn't write stories well, but as an assistant, it's amazing. Just a lot of little areas I used to get hung up on that the robot has turned into non issues.

I'm sort of wondering how a person spends 6 years writing a book. I'm maybe halfway through the first draft, and I'm already kind of hooked on seeing how the story turns out. I would not want to wait 6 years to read the ending, and I especially wouldn't want to wait 6 years for one paycheck.

I guess I'll see what happens on the first rewrite, because It's already obvious that it will be much harder than the draft. The draft just needs to tell the story, and hasn't been much of a problem, but to actually make it great will take a lot of thought.

My question is where do the authors you mentioned find the time? Are they working with the same average lifespan as me? Who spends 6 years on a job application? I guess it did pay off spectacularly for both of them.

A story that has always inspired me to write a book is the anecdote of Asimov writing the first foundation book in 3 days. It's widely regarded as the best sci fi novel of all time. Seems like a pretty good payoff for 72 hours work.

 

[sfoster]

My question is where do the authors you mentioned find the time?

You're talking to someone that has spent 10 years making short films nobody watches.
Now im going to spend another 5 years writing a book that nobody will read.

So to me six years doesn't sound so long...
I mean sure people graduate college and get a job and promotion and start families in that time..

Okay maybe it is a long time but they do say time is relative.

Do I have the same lifespan as you? No, my life ended a long time ago.
For whatever reason I was denied passage to the other side, some perverse priviledge or curse that made me a ghost instead.

So ya know, what else is there to do as a ghost on this planet?
Get high, eat snacks and play video games?

Been down that road. Know exactly where it leads.

How does someone spend 6 years writing a book?
Scratching and clawing your way forward one inch at a time.

Almost no ideas are good enough.
If I can have three different ideas i'm excited about in one week then that is a stellar week.

 

[James Rogers]

Check out Stephan King On Writing. Great book. Not only does he explain how he writes, but there is a bonus chapter at the end where he recalls in vivid detail the time he was taking a walk and a guy driving a van hit him.. Do you remember that? It nearly killed him. Anyway, to summarize what I got out of the book, spit the book out as fast as you can. Don't think, just write... That's the first draft and he says he completes this in less than a few months (remember, he writes 800-1200 page monster novels. The 2nd and 3rd draft are the refinements. He shows a few examples of pages that he had to refine. Yeah, talk about practically re-writing them...

 

[Nate North]

@sfoster

I think maybe it's similar to physics. Objects in motion stay in motion. Think of how difficult it is to balance a bike at 1 mph, and how easy it is at 15. (or 50 for motorcycles).

I don't think up ideas any faster than that, from a cold start. While I was writing this plot though, ideas sprung from the inertia of just what was neccesary to do the first idea, and began to fragment and create entirely new ideas. So I had a story, but no real twist, but I just kept going, and about halfway through the third day, I just came up with the twist by accident. So if I had waited to start writing until I had the twist, I never would have come up with the twist, because it kind of jumped out at me in the middle of the other idea in progress.

I'm actually more motivated now than when I started, since the story became more interesting en route.

Point being, maybe just run and gun for a while and see what happens. You never know what you'll come up with if you just jump in and see where it takes you.

I would think a magic school story would have a lot of opportunities to come up with fun creative ideas. Maybe if you took a non linear approach it would help reduce friction. Like you know that you need your own brand of interesting magic spells right? So write a section where they practice or learn the spells, and while you're inventing those, lets say one is a spell that allows a character to listen through walls. With that idea in your head you might suddenly realize that one of the students could try using it to cheat on a test. But what if that plan went wrong, and they actually overheard something far more serious being discussed? So it just seems to me that story elements can kind of cascade from any point in the story, and then you can create a coherent timeline in post.

 

[Nate North]

Check out Stephan King On Writing. Great book. Not only does he explain how he writes, but there is a bonus chapter at the end where he recalls in vivid detail the time he was taking a walk and a guy driving a van hit him.. Do you remember that? It nearly killed him. Anyway, to summarize what I got out of the book, spit the book out as fast as you can. Don't think, just write... That's the first draft and he says he completes this in less than a few months (remember, he writes 800-1200 page monster novels. The 2nd and 3rd draft are the refinements. He shows a few examples of pages that he had to refine. Yeah, talk about practically re-writing them...

Actually I read it, years back. It was good. That's basically what I'm doing right now. Just speedrunning the initial stage, so I can have a top down perspective on the plot in the second stage, the rewrite. I think the plan is working so far, Concept, then outline, then detailed outline, then chapter outlines, now writing the test of the book (page 83 right now), then the plan is to go back and build in careful foreshadowing to increase the strength of the midpoint reveal and escalate the drama surrounding the circumstances that follow.

 

[Nate North]

You're talking to someone that has spent 10 years making short films nobody watches.
Now im going to spend another 5 years writing a book that nobody will read.

So to me six years doesn't sound so long...
I mean sure people graduate college and get a job and promotion and start families in that time..

Okay maybe it is a long time but they do say time is relative.

Do I have the same lifespan as you? No, my life ended a long time ago.
For whatever reason I was denied passage to the other side, some perverse priviledge or curse that made me a ghost instead.

So ya know, what else is there to do as a ghost on this planet?
Get high, eat snacks and play video games?

Been down that road. Know exactly where it leads.

How does someone spend 6 years writing a book?
Scratching and clawing your way forward one inch at a time.

Almost no ideas are good enough.
If I can have three different ideas i'm excited about in one week then that is a stellar week.

And actually, I should mention that you gave me the idea that sparked this book. It was really simple. We were chatting about that woman who got arrested for the accident, and I was ranting on about it as usual, and at some point you reminded me, hey, you forgot to tell us what happened to her. I had a flicker of clarity there, and though, I'm waiting to start writing until I have some amazing hook, but that's just ego. All it takes to get someone interested in reading until they get a resolution is to introduce a character and put them in a situation with pending danger, and people will want to find out what happened. I came up with the simplest possible plot for that, and then just kept complicating it in ways that felt natural to the evolving circumstances. What I'm ending up with so far has actually been surprising, in that it's a far more interesting story than I had originally intended to write.

 

[sfoster]

Check out Stephan King On Writing. Great book. Not only does he explain how he writes, but there is a bonus chapter at the end where he recalls in vivid detail the time he was taking a walk and a guy driving a van hit him.. Do you remember that? It nearly killed him. Anyway, to summarize what I got out of the book, spit the book out as fast as you can. Don't think, just write... That's the first draft and he says he completes this in less than a few months (remember, he writes 800-1200 page monster novels. The 2nd and 3rd draft are the refinements. He shows a few examples of pages that he had to refine. Yeah, talk about practically re-writing them...

Sounds like a sure fire way for me to produce a steaming pile of shit and then end up with a polished turd

 

[sfoster]

And actually, I should mention that you gave me the idea that sparked this book. It was really simple. We were chatting about that woman who got arrested for the accident, and I was ranting on about it as usual, and at some point you reminded me, hey, you forgot to tell us what happened to her. I had a flicker of clarity there, and though, I'm waiting to start writing until I have some amazing hook, but that's just ego. All it takes to get someone interested in reading until they get a resolution is to introduce a character and put them in a situation with pending danger, and people will want to find out what happened. I came up with the simplest possible plot for that, and then just kept complicating it in ways that felt natural to the evolving circumstances. What I'm ending up with so far has actually been surprising, in that it's a far more interesting story than I had originally intended to write.

That sounds like the basis to the TV show "Lost"

 

[Nate North]

That sounds like the basis to the TV show "Lost"

With a few key differences, like how my story will have a point, and I'm not planning to send it out to 20 million people when I'm halfway done with the first draft, which I can only assume is how "Lost" was handled. I felt like it was pretty clear halfway through the series that they were just making it up as they went along, because they would raise 3 new questions every time they answered one. Sometimes I think hollywood writers aren't good at math. At the end of their show it was just like "Oh, and all the magic things that happened were because of reasons" and then rolled credits. I'm an unpaid novice writer, and even I know better than that.

 

[sfoster]

It's always a challenge navigating my house without setting foot in front of a mirror.

 

[Nate North]

Yeah, that's basically what it looks like in here. I put most of them in for the cats, who have now developed psychological problems as a result, and are constantly looking behind them because they think they are being stalked by the cats in the mirrors. The original idea was that I could get them to chase the laser pointer all over the place without me actually having to walk from room to room, but judging from their behavior, I think that the effect has been more Kafka esque, where they are trapped in an endless cycle of pursuit by their silent followers.

I can tell it's really taken a toll on them, because every time I show them "The Man with the Golden Gun" they freak out.

 

[sfoster]

Not to be a total downer, i actually had a productive week with 3 great ideas

One of them was the introduction of my villian and makes for an incredible short story on its own.
At least i can write the hell out of a short story. Instantly made the villian one of my favorite characters.

Another idea was erasing a supproting character/subplot - boy was I going in the wrong direction!
No need to explain all the guts of it, but i redrew the character and their trajectory and its so much better.

This is the big problem I have with just writing whatever and then polishing a turd later.
I started in May right, but if I had taken this 'just write approach' back then I'd have a shit story with a misguided, unpalatable subplot, i'd have 2/3 main characters completey spoiled and ruined rather than being lovable, and I would have totally missed out on having this villian.

All of this stuff is the foundation for the rest of the story and monetarily i should aim for at least a trilogy.
Not saying that people can't just sit down and write something great, sometimes you have an idea that you know in your gut is solid and you can just go to town. Sometimes you know the idea is half baked and you shouldn't start writing yet. At least for me.

Something like 'the way of the gun' is a fun film and was written in like 2 weeks.
- Which one of you is the brains? - "to tell you the truth i don't really think this is a brains operation'

I have been doing better lately and I agree chatGPT is a great helper.
Once I had it create a list of 70 bad ideas for me.. and eventually I was able to come up with a good one on my own.

Sucks it can't brainstorm actual original ideas, but it does help with staying focused and with research.