Lessons Learned

Writing About Writing #3

Writing About Fiction Writing

I’ve been writing here at Gibberish for 3 months. I’ve published 10 writing exercises (#11 coming tomorrow), republished one old piece, published one article of worldbuilding notes, written and scheduled a mini-series of 11 episodes (Sandbox Earth!), I’ve participated in two fictionista prompt parties, and done all this while maintaining another substack on a different subject.

I’ve learned a lot about writing but I have also learned a lot about writing fiction. Here is a selection of lessons I’ve learned, reflecting on the stories I’ve written so far.

Lessons Learned

Here are some things I have learned after almost 3 months of writing short fiction exercises here at Gibberish, presented in more or less the order I thought of them.

1) Writing Cliffhangers Is Easy

It feels like cheating to write cliffhangers into my short stories. The “Crunches” are my favorite and they are very limiting so I can’t really help but have a cliffhanger. The hard part is trying to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You want things like cliffhangers between each part, but by the end you have to tie it all together. That is much more difficult, and takes a lot more thought.

2) Pacing Is Important

My first exercise in the writing gym, Exercise #1, was a prompt. I took an idea and let myself write whatever I wanted. As I was writing I knew I lost track of things. I took too long to build something up, and then rushed to deliver because I got impatient.

Writing Crunches and other word-restricted fiction has forced me to think about what is important. How many words can I spend on setup? How many words can I spend on drama? How many words can I spend on delivering a catchy ending? Dare I say, a cliffhanger? When you restrict the words, it really forces you to think. On a couple crunches I’ve written a lot and then had to trim it down to make it fit, and that trimming process has been enlightening. Usually it’s a lot of extraneous description.

3) Writing Characters With Personality Is Hard

What makes a personality? I’ve been doing it with dialogue queues—verbal ticks like “You see?” or “Ohhhhh let me think” or “Wonderful, wonderful”. These are verbal ticks and can express something about a character. But personality is more than that. Behind the verbal tick needs to be something deeply intrinsic to the person. There needs to be a reason for it. What I’m afraid of is writing characters who are just me speaking the way I speak and thinking the way I think. I have to be really intentional with not just making my characters SOUND different, but making them actually BE different.

4) Writing Characters With A Dynamic Emotional Landscape

Speaking of making characters that are different, they need to have emotions, motivations, hopes, dreams, wounds, disappointments. My fear is that my characters come off as wooden planks, and not as rich and interesting people whom we can visualize and empathize with. I don’t want you to read “Johnny wept”, I want you to feel that weeping is the right thing for Johnny to do. That requires emotional contrast. If I want Johnny’s Bad Day to punch hard, I need to firmly establish Johnny’s happy day and the importance to Johnny of the thing, the loss of which makes his happy day go bad. It’s not Chekov’s Gun, it’s Chekov’s family photo album.

5) Compelling Dialogue That Moves The Story And Establishes The Character Is Hard

Speaking of Speaking, Dialogue needs to be intentional to the story. Bill and Alice can’t talk about the weather unless it matters. Bill and Alice can talk about Bill’s new car if they are about to drive away from a bank robbery. They can talk about the weather if the rain makes getting away from the bank robbery harder. Dialogue that establishes personality is easy; Dialogue that moves the story effectively is hard.

6) I Struggle With Moments Focused On Action More Than Dialogue.

Characters doin’ stuff is important but how much is showing and how much is telling? I struggle with balancing this, which is why I tend more on the dialogue side and less on the poetical descriptive prose and sequential action. I have a movie in my head of how I want things to go, and I get overwhelmed by action sequences—they tend to sprawl and I tend to rush them to a close. I want action sequences to feel intense, the action to be logical and visual, and all the moving parts to get from my head to your head without translation errors.

7) TL;DR: The Art Of Storytelling Is Hard

Telling a story is hard, period. I casually perused an article by Chuck Palahniuk and I was struck by how casually he told a very factual article in a story-tellers way. Everything we write is a story, but he found a way to write an article in a compelling way that felt like he was telling a story. It impressed me. I struggle with differentiating my voice—when I am writing an article like this one, it’s very academic: given X, consider B. Then my stories are very…serious? But not devoid of their fun or whimsy. I’m just ruminating on all this and thinking about how everything adds up to the art of storytelling. I am just getting started, folks!

Stick with me!

Thank you for reading and learning with me! Gibberish is so much fun to write and it really means a lot that any of you find something worthwhile here to read.

God bless you all!

-Scoot

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Ad Jesum Per Mariam