Writing Report August 12, 2022

I had a really thoughtful piece of Donald Trump and what I perceived as the Murdoch media empire’s first tentative steps to move past him set to go tonight then everything blew up big time.

All the points I made in my previous post remain valid, but now just…passé.

Today’s situation is still volatile, and we’ll all see how it plays out next week when the screaming stops and the dust settles, but for now I’ll just run another writing report.

You’re good with that, right?

. . .

The current work-in-progress just crested 74,000 words.

I’m guestimating the first draft will hit 85-88K by the time I’m done.

I’m taking a couple of days break on it because as I close in on the climax, I still have a few mechanics to work out.

I know what needs to happen, it’s just the choreography (so to speak) that needs to be refined right now.

. . .

Of the last three major projects I’ve done (including the current W-I-P), the common linking factor is humor.

They’re all stories with large casts that ricochet off one another in a variety of contradictory motives, adding to the fun (hopefully!). 

Of the three, I’d say only one fits into what could be called a recognizable genré:  The sports novel.

(And even then it’s not your typical sports novel
as it spends as much time with various front office
machinations as it does with the players’ struggles).

Genre fiction tends to come with sets of built-in tropes, and while those tropes are helpful in writing genré fiction, they do not necessarily translate well to the task of writing good fiction.

Conversely, there isn't a lesson to be learned in general fiction writing that can't be successfully applied to genre fiction.

I enjoyed a reputation in my younger years as an action / adventure writer, in particular the types of adventure fantasy found in Thundarr The Barbarian, Dungeons And Dragons, Visionaries, and Conan The Adventurer.

I found writing those types of stories rather easy: 
Pick a plot, then every time things started to slow down, throw another monster in.

Fun…but ultimately boring.

My last three projects, while populated with large casts, focus less on scale and more on human conflict.

(Which is not to say there aren’t any large scale scenes
in them, just that large scale scenes aren’t the focus.)

I’ve found focusing on smaller scale stories forces writers to focus on the intensity of human emotion as opposed to the epic scale of spectacle.

It's a helluva lot harder to write an intense emotional scene of two people talking that an epic battle in which hordes of orcs fight armored knights astride firebreathing dragons for the one great golden crown that will provide absolute mastery over the entire universe.

Michael Mann's Heat is a crime caper movie and a damn fine one, but the best scene in the movie, a scene that defies all crime caper tropes, the one that justifies the entire film, is just two guys sitting down for a cup of coffee.

There’s a difference between skill and art.

Write to keep your skill set honed, absolutely.

Don’t hack out stuff because you think you need to.

A martial artist practices daily so they don’t have to attend every fight they’re invited to.

Speaking or writing from the heart is not the same as babbling incessantly.

The most effective comments are often the rarest.

© Buzz Dixon