How Was Your Weekend? · 2:09am Aug 10th, 2015
So, how was everybody's weekend? I just came back from Bronycon and I learned so much from the writing panels. I would have to say that the most useful thing I've learned are about two different approaches to the craft; the gardening approach, where you start with an idea and let it grow from there, and the structural style, where you plot out everything in advance.
I am extremely jealous of those who plot everything out carefully before you begin actually writing the story, that takes so much planning and patience which is something I don't really have when it comes to spinning a tale. I want to get to writing as fast as possible because that's the best part for me. At the same time I feel bad for those who enjoy my stories, when I can't deliver anything especially complex.
So, back to the original question. How was your weekend? Anything interesting happen? I would love to discuss about writing or just about anything really!
my weekend has been good so far
I rarely write, but I find the structural method most agreeable. I do have a tendency to be meticulous and Type A, though, so maybe it just follows from that.
I got a lot accomplished this weekend. Got some personal projects worked on and finished a little musical composition. Also got some preparations for my move-in to the college campus done this weekend.
I did not go to BronyCon. Didn't have anyone to go with and I'm still a young adult yet. I consider myself also still a fledgling Brony, so I don't think I would derive as much from the experience yet.
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Congratulations on completing your projects! I'm excited to check it out on your channel! Like I said before, I'm completely lost when it comes to writing structurally, but I'm very eager to see what careful, laid out stories that can come out of it. Do you have any advice on where to begin with that? Would it be like writing an essay? Outlining your draft, creating it, revising it, then making a final copy? This would also mean creating outlines for character arcs, settings, and problems as well. I guess this is where my problem is; there's just so much stuff to do!
With that aside, I'm very happy to hear that you're going to college! I'm moving in later this month, with school starting early September. I'm going for game design, what about you?
3308312 Well,, rather, I only completed one project this weekend and worked on the others.
Still, I'm pretty happy that I got that composition done. I'm still a dilettante at composing, so I use random digits and progressions I understand to help formulate most of what I do in my own time now.
Huh. My style of planning was somewhat similar to the methods I employed in my school essays, yes, but often I didn't have enough time, owing to due dates, to really plan and structure extra lengthy works like the fanfiction I wrote. In fact, mine's the longest single work I've ever written, and I was baffled at how many words were in me by the time I had finished it.
I digress. I went about it in a similar style, but not quite. I was never trained for creative writing. I know of the concepts of story and character arcs, planning and staging conflict as well as resolutions, and depictions, but I don't know the ins and outs like most true writers on here do. I'm just an amateur who gets an idea or two from time to time and happens to be grammatical when he executes them.
That said, my plan was take the ideas and inspiration that came to me and run with it. However, this entailed patience on my part; most of my story did not come to me all at once. From the beginning, I had an idea for the premise and a number of crucial events that would lead up to the resolution, which, albeit still fuzzy in my mind even about a third of the way actually writing the thing, occurred to me very distinctly, and I felt I did a good job with it when I was finished. My main method was to write every single idea that came to me down as soon as it came to me -- with no hesitation. Always had a writing utensil and some paper with me in case inspiration struck. Granted, the greatest breakthroughs I had were those classic moments of lucidity most people have while showering or just about drop off to dreamland. As for me, I'd keep repeating the scenes that occurred to me over and over until I got out of my shower and over to my desk. I lost some precious sleep, as well, for my diligence, but I wouldn't have traded those raw ideas for half-baked ones devised as filler and maybe a few extra moments of slumber. There were times at the keyboard typing down my ideas and fleshing them out I had some brilliant sparks of inspiration, too, and, although often my most poetic lines were conceived when I was deliberately trying to make something with rhetorical quality, there's little that can supplant those raw glimmers of inspiration.
Of course, my work hasn't caught that much ground but hasn't fallen on its face, either. I guess, in retrospect, what I really meant to say was that my works almost always have structure before my writing them in the sense that I have a very good idea of what's going to happen before I even write it down. Sure, some thoughts or scenes might need some bridging, and some details that occur to the writer might be brilliant but have no place yet in the main storyline, but there's no use in letting them go to waste: always write the ideas down. That way, at least, if you're busy you can make the small commitment of getting the ideas down and make the bigger commitment of fleshing them out and organizing them later on. I started working on a sequel to my work but stopped abruptly when the ideas ceased. Sure, I don't like having perfectly good ideas waiting in some document to be acted upon, but at least they're not atrophying in my memory. I may never act upon them. I hope not, but, at the very least, my brainwaves may not go to waste. I could always give the ideas to some writer who's struggling to become better at their craft but just doesn't have enough executable ideas to write with. It's a frustrating situation. At least then I might be able to help somebody, even if I feel that the ideas are better in my hands.
As a casual writer, an understand that an active writer, as I take you to be, might be rather dissatisfied with my solution of letting things go until inspiration recurs. Probably, if I thought about that sequel more, I'd start getting back onto the line of thinking, but that's currently what I need right now. I need to focus on preparing for college and tying up loose ends before I must move out to a city two hours away to room with two young men I've never met before. There, I expect to have even less time to work on personal projects like audio readings. I don't want inspiration coming to me for a story I'm not even sure I can act upon immediately. That's how Type A I am, I guess: black and white: if I can't get it done now, I shouldn't even think about doing it until I can again.
I feel like this explanation and method really is less ingenious than I thought it was, and a writer like yourself may not even have any use for my method. If you constantly have ideas floating in your head, it may not make sense to drain your brain by pouring them out on the page. But I've always held that it's much easier to organize and edit and master an idea if it's already put down before the writer. It strikes me that this something you've probably already considered, but I'd say it worked for me. I was very satisfied with how my first fanfiction turned out, and even non-Bronies who have read it have told me they enjoyed the writing. Although I'm hardly satisfied with how it's largely been undiscovered, even amongst the select few readers who I think I would enjoy it, I think these details are not a testament to my inexperience or lack of finesse with my method.
Anyway! I'm glad to hear you're also on your way to pursuing a higher education. I'm moving in on the twentieth and will be starting classes a few days later, I think. I will be attending college to obtain a degree in actuarial science.
Yes, I'm a math guy; however, I'm sure you know I have penchants and capabilities spanning beyond just the worlds of numbers, statistics, and economics. 
My weekend was pretty good to be frank.
But going on with the planning, I completely understand the fact that you can't plan a whole entire story and that's your writing style and I respect it! But to go with it writing short stories to medium length stories can require little to no planning. I've concluded why the "one shot moment" stories are always the best way to write. But if you're writing something to be sur-realistic as I am you're going to need a lot of planning! In fact I've been planning out my story for nearly two years now and it's a slow process.
But really, I have nothing against your thought process and I respect it! But as said at the "Do's and Dont's" panel, you should take a week break from your story and then go over it, make corrections to the story and then finally publish it. As the Old Griffins would say in my story: "Veryu suiksyas tou es vono gretusya" (may the gods guide you on your path)
I can't agree with you more! My approach to writing -I feel- is very odd. At one point in time, I'll come up with a scene, or even just a sentence. If Fluttershy is screaming in Dash's face, "You killed him! I-I thought we were friends?!" Well, like most people, I would want to know what in Equestria is going on. This leads me to steadily gathering more and more ideas that I can use to paste the gap from the beginning of the story to where I imagined.
This is my problem though: I NEVER THINK OF THE ENDING TO THE STORY! This is a huge problem in my longer stories, where either the scene I dreamed of came and gone, and now I don't know what to write anymore, or I press farther into the story without any vision on where it ends up, then at the tip of the hat I'm screaming to myself HOW DID IT GET HERE?!
The best example of this would be my first story, which is heavily inspired by the anime Full Metal Alchemist. The only thing that I pictured was Fluttershy being transmuted, and then after that I just stopped writing. It makes me so sad knowing that, for one reason or another, people actually did ask what was going to happen next, or when the update was coming, because I had absolutely no clue. Eventually -and I have no idea why- I decided that I would actually finish the story up even though I had no idea what it was about anymore and no idea where it was going to go.
Yes, this works great for shorter stories, but I'm wanting to work on longer ones as well, but I don't want to work with everything chapter by chapter like I usually do. Much like a published author, I would love to have a deeper, well connected story, but don't have the skill to do so yet.
I'm super excited to hear how school goes for you, and am really happy that this discussion helped take a load off. I'm hoping to post more blog stuff, but am once again unsure on what they should or will be about :p
3308456 I hadn't realized you replied to me. I didn't get a ntofication.
I wish I could write like that, just taking an idea and running with it. That said, I very rarely will write something if I don't have any sane ideas for an ending.
As for your story/update situation, I imagine it must pose quite a quandary. Of course, I never start uploading until I have the story complete in my own hands, so I don't know what that's like, having people anxiously awaiting an end you're not sure you can provide because you don't know what it is. I guess I just kind of circumvented that by doing what I previously mentioned, uploading on a schedule even though I could've uploaded the whole thing at once.
Right, you want to feel like your story has some form of finality. The symphonies people want to hear again generally tend to end back at home base. Powerful forms of rhetoric lie in tying the ends smoothly. I don't know how people manage to tie so many things together with such finesse at the end of their works, but some powerful ways of adding finality to something include having a motif incorporated throughout a tale that ends up reaching its conclusion around the same time the main event does and featuring some sort of reference to the beginning. Repetition occurs at the beginning and conclusion of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. Albeit it happens in different senses, there's the rhetorical effect of finality there. In one of the stories I did a reading for, a song mentioned at the beginning of the story is mentioned again at the end in a much more sinister context, as befit the tale.
Thank you! I will try to keep an actual blog on here or otherwise keep you posted about how it's going. Indeed, talking it out has made me feel a lot better. Lots of stuff I've been meaning to at least convey to another writer for a long time.
Same here. I've always used my blog to post about readings and stuff, but I honestly don't know how much good it does and think sometimes that maybe I should just use it for a sort of public journal.