The Confabulator Cafe

Author: apoland

  • With Friends Like These, Who Has Energy for Shame?

    This is probably one thing that doesn’t bother me about writing — there is at not point where I’ve been ashamed to admit what I write.

    Okay, that’s actually a little bit of a lie, but I didn’t want to talk about fanfiction for, what, the sixth week in a row? I can’t help it; the bulk of my experience in writing fanfiction. It’s just what I did do.

    I’ve never been, precisely, ashamed or worried about what I’ve written. I went through a phase in college where I deleted accounts that hosted the most pornographic of the stuff I’d written, worried that it would hurt my chances of becoming a “real” writer. (If only I could have known that 2012 would make a fad out of porn written by emotionally-immature women, I’d’ve kept it up!) And I sometimes sort of hedge around the topic of fandom, though less and less as I realize that I don’t want to fragment my experiences like that.

    But when I was 17? Oh man, I was mortified of the very thought of people finding out what I was writing during classes. I used to hedge around it with phrases like “alternative fiction” and “character-building stuff.”

    I think this might have even continued, if I hadn’t moved to Madison right out of high school to live/work with a good friend of mine. She’s a poet and very bohemian and all that stuff, so filters were things for other people. She knew I was shy and horrible around new people, and thus introduced me to her friends (and people we had just met) with, “Hi, this is Ashes — she writes gay anime porn!” And I mean ALL THE TIME. A friend of hers from her hometown (who is now published, so, hooray for him!) brought her his manuscript one afternoon, and she’s like, “Ashes wants to be a writer too — she’s writing anime porn right now!” And he’s like, “Cool, fan fiction is pretty rad.”

    Or something like that. I was 18 and literally terrified.

    But you know what? I realized quickly that no one gave a shit what I was writing. (And in the right hippie circles, it was actually interesting.)
    (more…)

  • Human Interest (Flash Fiction)

    He sets the toys carefully aside on the floor, revealing the shotgun hidden beneath them. His fingerprints paint red smudges as he brushes the doll’s synthetic curls and remembers the little girl who called her baby.

    His shirt sticks to his wound. He’s tired from the walk but numb to the pain. It’s probably too late for him — definitely too late for her. It’s not too late to make a scene, to ensure their senseless deaths aren’t hidden halfway through the local news.

    The wagon wheels creaking behind him, he limps into the assembly.

    Let them see what they missed.

  • It’s the Triforce of Storytelling

    I’m going to break the fourth wall here for a minute: this week’s topic was hard for me, because it’s hard for me to think of the writing I do as having any sort of technique. I realize how pretentious that sounds. I don’t mean, like, Everything I do is pure a~rt~ or anything like that — nor do I mean it in the self-deprecating (my favorite) way of, nothing I write is any go~od T_T. It’s just that, um, I just write and think about all that other shit later.

    Here I am, two days before my post is supposed to go up (and thus days late from the poor editors POV), with a cup of coffee, and I’m thinking: When I’m writing, how do I try to manipulate my reader?

    And there it is: I want to mess with my reader’s feelings. I want to own my reader for about 30K to 70K words and never ever let them go. I want to make their whole brain go HOORAY or NO NOT AT ALL NOPE or OMG WHY or, maybe sometimes, HMMMMM. I even expect them do it in all caps. If life were Tumblr, I would expect them to need at least three reaction GIFs by the end of my story.

    Now that I think of it that way, oh, of course. I use techniques. Duh.

    It’s still taken me damn near two hours to figure out the rest of this post. The number of failed drafts would utterly boggle you.

    SPN - Writing is Hard
    You can’t mention reaction GIFs without including one. Internet Law.

    I think there are three things I try to do well to keep a reader invested. (Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously.)

    1. World Building
    2. Characters
    3. Structure

    I don’t always do them well, or maybe I don’t always pay attention to what I’m doing, but generally speaking, this is how I do it.

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  • The More You Grow

    Last week I discussed how having a kid sort of disrupted my writing cycle, and this week I’m going to continue in a similar vein: how getting pregnant forced me to grow up a bit, and how growing up informed my writing.

    Before my son was born, I sort of did this party thing. There was a lot of drinking and poor life choices and loud music and it was all a blast. I even, sometimes, miss it. But given the narrow focus of my hobbies (video games, alcohol, and sex), my writing sort of reflected my immaturity. I wrote a lot of what I thought was some really deep, vaguely self-righteous, adult stuff about relationships and life that’s shallow in retrospect. It’s no wonder it never went anywhere.

    I’m not saying that kids don’t occasionally bust out wisdom and fantastic stories, but I, at least, was not one of them.
    (more…)

  • Quitting Might Be a Symptom

    I’ve never actively quit writing on the whole, in the sense that I actively made the decision to stop writing. I have, however, let life overwhelm my desire to write and stop me from going on. I’ve also quit writing fanfiction, which I love, because I thought it was the ‘more mature’ choice. (I’ve since started again.)

    Both sucked.

    Good news: neither was permanent. If you read nothing else in the big anecdotal love-fest that’s about to go down here, then take this: Just because you’ve stopped, doesn’t mean that you can’t start again. If you’re suffering from the lack of creative output, then stop suffering and start writing again.

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  • Freedom Is Not So Easily Bought

    Straeon Manor - Kitchen 1967Kitchen — 1967

    “William, is this really necessary?” Barbara watches the movers heft the thing up onto her counter and frowns, one arm over her chest and the other over her mouth. Damn, but William is like a child on Christmas: leaning too close to the movers, examining the little knobs. Of course, that was William. He finally hit on an idea that paid off, and he began to bleed money.

    It started with moving in to this creepy old house — just because the neighbors were a certain kind of wealthy, a class of people who had been too good to hire Barbara to clean their homes. Now he was obsessed with filling it with things, silly and frivolous, to make life easy. She was getting smaller and smaller every day, with every new ‘freedom’ that William’s newly won fortune provided. She cleared her throat to pull herself out of that frame of thought. “It’s such an eye sore.”

    He stepped back from the counter and wrapped an arm around her waist. “It’s the future, Barb! Look at it. In ten years no one will use an oven at all. Do you have any idea how much less time you’ll spend cooking?” He kissed her cheek and nuzzled her close, as though they were sixteen again. “You shouldn’t be on your feet so much, once you’re pregnant.”

    Mutely, she nodded as the men handed some paperwork to William and left. The microwave, unfortunately, remained behind. Light reflected off the metallic surfaces — her reflection, distorted in the frame of the door. (more…)

  • Writing: It’s Just This Thing, You Know?

    Ha. Um… Oh dear.

    Why do I write?

    It took a while, but I remember why I started writing: I wanted to tell the story better. I was reading something (Star Wars novels. Babysitter’s Club and Trixie Belden books. Fanfiction on a dial-up connection in 1998.) and I would think, “Hey, that’s cool and all, but…”

    In the beginning, it was just about having an idea and wanting to tell you all about it.

    It’s not a bad beginning, but it doesn’t sum up why I keep doing it. I’m afraid the overall answer isn’t really awesome or deep. It’s just — I do. I imagine that being a writer is something so built into me that I can’t really be anything else. I’m not really good at anything else.

    (more…)

  • Sweat the Bad Reviews. Sometimes.

    It took me a while to work out where I was going with this topic, because I can’t think of a lot of advice I’ve gotten from other writers, and none of it personal. After covering two bits of good not-quite-advice, I finally found the advice that I couldn’t step away from: “Don’t sweat the bad reviews.”

    It’s not bad advice. I agree in principle, but it’s over-simplified. I think over-simplified is bad. I think over-simplified leads to professional writers who don’t read their own reviews at all and can’t see the difference between “The quality of this series has decreased,” and “Bad reviewers are just sexually frustrated haters.”

    You can’t please everyone, but there’s a big difference between someone leaving a review because they weren’t your target audience1, someone leaving bad reviews because they sort of hate you personally, and someone leaving a review because they’re pointing out what they feel to be genuine problems in the work.

    I don’t believe, at any spectrum of success, that an author should agonize and dwell on bad reviews. That said, I do believe in taking the bad with the good — and sometimes the bad is a reviewer calling you a hack. So, generally, I feel like this advice would be better stated as, “Consider what the bad review is saying, and make your own judgement.”

    In my favorite form lately: personal anecdote time!

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  • When Subplots Go Bad

    Your mileage is going to vary when it comes to subplots. I feel like authors who can handle large casts of characters, or who write long-running series, or both, have a greater license with subplot. They can weave them through several stories, and slide them in more carefully.

    For me as a writer, subplot is a balancing act. I have to be careful not to let side details overwhelm the story.

    First, let me be clear: I love subplots. There is not a single thing that I don’t love about the stories within the story — mostly because life is a series of subplots, of character back stories and minor quests.

    As a reader, I love to know what else the main character has going on. Yes, sure, this romance is nice and all — but tell me more about what’s going on about her father’s assassination. Author, you’ve been dropping hints for chapters now, and damn it, I need to know!

    Also, I love the catharsis at the end of the huge story reveal. When the main plot and most of the subplots get wrapped up in a nice little bow. When done right, there’s this exhale, and it’s all clear. The whole story has focus: the threads are wrapped and the stragglers aren’t a big deal, and it’s amazing.

    (In a really good book, there’s also the element of, “I totally didn’t see that coming!”)

    But subplots don’t always work. Sometimes they feel tacked in for “depth,” like the hypotenuse of the love triangle that was never really a question. Other times they distract from the plot, either because they ended up more interesting than the plot (at which point: whoops, that draft needs more time to stew) or because the author preferred the subplot.

    I’m guilty of both, but I’m really guilty of the latter. I have the bad habit of falling in love with characters and wanting to share all those interesting things about them, even when they’re not relevant.

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  • Writer’s Block Is a Choice

    It seems like there’s two brands of writer’s block: there’s “My muse has not graced me with her presence,” and there’s, “I have no ideas.” Maybe there are more, but we’re going to focus on these two.

    The short version is: I think both are a bit BS.

    I can understand factors in every day life that take up mental energy. Sometimes my space is cluttered and dirty, and I can’t focus. I can understand being busy and distracted.1 I can understand needing a break from the process. I can even understand staring at a story and being like, “This story is impossible. I need to work on something else today.”

    The choice not to write is valid; you can decide today is a day that you need to preserve your energy for other tasks, or spend time with your family. But to then say, “Oh, I would write today, but you know — writer’s block,” is bullshit. It’s an excuse that you’re painting as a reason.

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