Welcome to the 15th (fifteenth) writing club update. Opening Manu Saadia’s Trekonomics to page 15 (“Portrait of the Author as a Young Fan”), we find this fiction related snippet:
When the movie [Star Trek: The Motion Picture] was over, I really, really did not want to leave the bridge of the Enterprise. I had to make that experience last. I still remember that very precise feeling, equal parts wonderment, recognition, and melancholy: this was the place I had been looking for, this was where I wanted to live, this was where I belonged. I had found my promised land. Pity it was all fiction and make-believe.
A pity indeed that the post-scarcity almost-utopia of Star Trek’s Federation is only make-believe. But then isn’t a story an almost-world, waiting to be brought forward by the midwives of action. Maybe casting writers and artists as parents is overstating our importance a little bit… it’s nice to think about, though.
But what I can’t overstate is how great our writers are:
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Speaking of “vantage points” this is the POV I’m always trying for as well. It’s a challenge not to internalize the guilt of hustle/thrive culture, but glad you’ve got you’ve got a healthy perspective on progress. If nothing else, it just makes existing in the world more pleasant. :)
What’s your approach to outlining your book? Is it like a “vision statement”, or blurb, or maybe a list of sections you want to fill in? Curious because I am also an outliner.
It definitely helps not having any plans of monetization at all. I think if I had an aspiring career author inside me, it would be much more difficult to avoid that guilt. I’ve had such projects before (i.e. doctoral dissertation) that definitely brought up much more guilt when not working on it.
In line with what I wrote above, whenever an activity is for the sake of doing that activity, and not a means to an end, it tends to be much more enjoyable, at least for me :) I have many hobbies that I would love to spend more time on, but would loathe doing professionally.
I started with a preface (which I had written previously), which I guess you could call some sort of vision statement. It gives me an opportunity to get my intentions of the book in writing. I then proceeded with a “How to read this book” (which in this case would be useful, as it is not necessarily meant to be read cover to cover). That forces me to think of how I would structure it so that it would make sense for a possible future reader.
What I did now was to outline a list of parts, chapters and sections. That should together be collectively exhaustive of what I want to write (even though it is obviously just a draft, and edits can be made down the line), but it should also be mutually exclusive (i.e. the MECE-principle). If it’s not mutually exclusive, I’ve done something wrong in the proposed structure and I should rethink it. In my last session, I for example realized that I had one part that had considerable overlap with another, even though it didn’t seem like it at the time I wrote it down the first time. That caused me to move the chapters from that part into the other existing parts, with minor modifications to the angle.
While writing the chapter headers, I also jotted down any immediate thoughts I had while thinking about it to serve as a starting point when I jump into it proper. In some cases that would be some phrases I thought of, other times just a list of concepts I know I should include, and in a couple of cases I wrote (parts of) the introduction paragraph for that chapter.
I would not do this for a work of fiction though - I have some ideas for solarpunk themed fiction down the line, and if/when I eventually get to that, I will likely outline the major events of the story first, then try to spread that out on some timeline. From there I would do any required world building (which in this case would be the most fun part) and then start writing. But I have actually some time back written the first chapter of this book without any of those parts in place though, so I am certainly not as structured as I might give the impression of here… :)
You certainly do give the impression of being a very methodical writer, but I understand that for some people structure is simply a tool and not necessarily an all-encompassing way of life.
TIL about the the MECE-principle–that sent me down a fun Wikipedia rabbit hole. Hearing you describe how your arraying your sections really sounds tantalizing, but you’re right in that it wouldn’t translate well to fiction–not unless that fiction were very structured haha. Kind of absurdly so… sort of… fun to puzzle over…
But no! That’s silly. I’m just a sucker for systems, even though what they often amount to in my case is procrastination more than productivity. In that regard, you seem to have a decent handle on the most important part of writing, which is of course, actually committing words to the page.
Thanks for sharing so much of your process. This is exactly the kind of deep diving I hoped to get into with this writing club.
If you want your fiction to convey a specific, coherent message, you can of course still structure that underlying message this way so that you end up with well-argued message. The task is then to inject those arguments into the story. I guess this could be used as either a starting-point for the story (i.e. the message being the main reason you write in the first place) or something that can be developed independent of the main story (but then more as some kind of side-snacks? otherwise it could feel forced)