Mother of Wisdom & 'Sloppy Truth' – A Reminder

This particular blog post is more for my benefit than anyone else's, but feel free to stick around.

Mother of Wisdom is something that's appeared from an idea I had around Christmas time. I wrote a pilot chapter then and never came back to it – until a few days ago. Now I've written the remaining 'laps', and I'm publishing the lot. Is there anything more to say?

Yes! Yes, there is.

Sloppy Truth. Some of the second chapter and most of the last chapter use what I'm calling the sloppy-truth technique. What's that? It's basically what I think I should try doing here for a bit. It's when I write freely and don't allow my obsession for getting everything 'just so' to impinge. That means I narrate as myself – clunky, raw, sloppy, clumsy – but true. The great thing is it will force me to nail the substance in stories (or so I hope). It isn't about the prose; it's about the substance. Sadly, I don't think I've operated like that for most things.

Now, this isn't all or nothing. (For instance Solitaire I started already, and it's definitely going to remain my rigorous piece of work.) All I'm saying is this is an experiment. I looked over the pile of stories I haven't published and thought, 'Why?' It's because I've overworked them. This isn't a thesis at the end of the day. It's pony fiction, which I'm meant to be writing for fun, and I think I'll benefit from a little more relaxation in this respect.

If you've read this and found the writing easy enough to read, good. That's the sloppy-truth method, and it seems to work for you.

Now, the problem with Mother of Wisdom is it's inconsistent. Some of it is sloppy-truth writing; some of it isn't. But I'm trying not to care that it's inconsistent. I'm getting it out there to force myself to let go of the notion that everything I put out has to show rigorous writing. What Mother of Wisdom has is substance. I want to swallow the pain of how ugly it looks and instead enjoy that I've completed something that explores a theme effectively. It's poorer prose, but it's better substance. As I said, normally I do things the other way round.

Anyway, here's my reminder about these thoughts. Oh, and from now on I'd better self-tag any applicable new stories 'sloppy truth'. That way I know, and so does anyone who cares.

And who knows? Maybe in a week's time I'll think this was a load of nonsense and go back to my old ways for better or worse. We'll see.

Sloppy-Truth Method:

1) Write in first-person present, in the (horse)shoes of the character.
2) (Optional) Transpose this to third-person past.
3) Check that it makes sufficient grammatical sense (because if it takes me to sentence parsing, I'm doomed) and does the job it's meant to do substance-wise.
4) That's it. No obsessing over word choice. No obsessing over sharp, efficient sentences. That means lots of aesthetic pain, and that's OK because I think it'll do me good. At the very least, isn't Fimfiction a good place to run an experiment like this?