My Writing Studio is (Temporarily) Open: Announcing a New Week-Long Writing Experiment · 5:46pm Sep 17th, 2020
Blog Number 93: Backstage Pass Edition
Hmmm... change of plans.
Usually, I go all secretive and evasive when it comes to developing a project up to completion (assuming I do complete one), but the downside is it can leave me feeling disconnected from other people, making the audience seem "alien". Given I'm about as natural a performer as a library shut-in, it's kind of intimidating until I recognize a couple of familiar commenters.
That's a bit of a bugger because there's one thing that gets in the way of my writing (or at least of my writing more than I have written up until now). It's when the seemingly perfect story plan (and I do love putting together a story plan; if there's one thing I like doing, it's collecting and organizing info on stuff I find fascinating) stops looking perfect as soon as I try to put it into long, long stretches of prose.
So, for a one-off experiment, I'll try the opposite approach. Instead of hiding everything, I'll post regular updates about an open project as it's progressing. The goal is to try and unblock some of the blockages with a more relaxed approach.
Details follow...
The Theory Behind the Experiment: What Writing Is
Stage fright, for instance, is a bit of a problem.
You see, I'm coming to think writing is a performance art, in a way. Or like interactive software development, but with wetware and wood pulp/word streams rather than silicon chips and plastic. It's easy to forget when you've got an inert book or a static webpage lying in front of you, but when it comes to writing and reading, this isn't a passive activity in the same way that looking at a statue or a painting would be. Or looking at a big block of raw, nigh-unintelligible computer code.
The way I see it, the code - the written words - is just a medium, a sort of necessary but uninteresting stage for the real action to play upon. The performance comes in when that's translated into a simulation of a world inside your own head.
Writer's head as they develop it, or reader's head as they run it: my point works either way. What the writer does is encode a vast, complicated virtual world from the ground up, every step of which is as the strike of a musical note or the next line spoken by an actor, and then cast it out and hope the whole thing progresses properly from start to finish. An instance of running the program, or the night of the performance, is where it all comes together, is what it's all ultimately for.
Of course, the metaphors aren't perfect.
This is a linear program with not much flexibility (words can only go in one long string, not in three dimensions), and unlike other performance art, there's a clear section wherein the most obvious performer - the author - doesn't have to be physically present.
Nevertheless, especially in this day and age, immediate physicality is not a necessary requirement for a performance anymore ("immediate" because obviously they've got to be physically present at some point beforehand: even if we lived in a world run by automatic robots, someone's got to set it all up first). I think the metaphors work well enough for my purposes.
And like my twin metaphors of computer programming and performance art, it's a long and patience-grinding process of bashing your head against a wall trying to work out how the hell you get the cool idea you want to implement out there, and exactly as intended, and why it's causing that stupid glitch there when all you wanted to do was make it run this bit here.
Plus there's the debugging, patching, necessary compromises with reality's demands, and occasional inevitable flubbed bits you just have to muscle through.
The Theory Behind the Experiment: What The Problem Is
All that, broadly speaking, is why I don't think it was entirely fanciful language when I described my rougher patches as feeling like stage fright. Computer programmers have to bite their nails as the testers do their best to find out what's wrong with the program that they've slaved over for hours and hours, and see whether or not they can make it crash.
More personally (I'm not a computer programmer and never really learned), it's like going out on stage with the script scarcely in your head and hoping like hell you don't forget your lines or fail to do that really cool thing you thought looked good in rehearsals.
See, I used to be involved in drama clubs when I was younger, and two of the worst things I learned pretty damn early on were:
- I'm next to useless without a script. Improvisation was something I was neither good at nor fond of. One of the reasons I prefer writing is because it's easier to take my time over it and let ideas drop in as and when they feel like it.
- I have very narrow limits to what I will or will not do on-stage. Or to put it another way, I could very easily end up typecasting myself. It took a lot of persuasion to get me to do anything outside my comfort zone on-stage, and even then I'd resist doing it again. (Singing, for example: I'm dreadful at it and I know it. I only ever sung a solo once in front of an audience, and I hated every second of it. The rest of the time, I relied on the rest of the cast singing and just mouthed the words).
Both are a handicap when it comes to acting because they run counter to two useful abilities: quick flexibility, and a lack of self-consciousness.
I'm not too bothered about the first one - writing practically encourages a laid-back approach, which means any pressure to be faster and smarter is my own business - but the second one is, I think, why I tend to lock up at the prose-crafting stage despite revelling in a good bit of planning. It's also the one that butts heads with my writing ambitions.
Generally, I find it just too easy to not like doing something new and potentially risky. Even if I've done it before, and even when - intellectually - I have no problem with it, that's not a natural method of approach for me.
Like that list of genres I talked about a couple of blog posts back: sure, writing a romance sounds like a daringly sweet change of pace, but I find myself digging in my heels the instant an enjoyable story-planning session suddenly has to give way to writing the damn thing out loud, convincingly and in detail. Yeah, the kissing scene goes there, but what the hell should it look like in practice? How many words is just right? Shouldn't there be a bit more flair and characterization than can be conveyed by a dull "And then they kissed"? And supposing I forget about some crucial bit, without which the scene looks like every damn kissing scene ever? Where's the unique spark? Where's the money shot?
Keep in mind, something like this regular collapse of conviction - to say nothing of worse incidents besides - has been going on for years in my head, and is it any wonder I've made more than one blog post announcing my "retirement" from writing? Playing a performer can be a curse even for those naturally built to do it, and I'd be hard-pressed to say I count myself among that number.
Basically, I think I'd like to unwind a bit. I'm a pragmatist. The key to getting things done is to figure things out.
The Theory Behind the Experiment: What My Intended Solution Will Be
So, because calling something an "experiment" goes a long way towards taking the pressure off it to succeed, I'm going to try one. A "self-unwinding" experiment, so to speak.
The essential point is familiarization. Instead of hiding away a story plan until publication and then biting my nails until the comments arrive, I'm going to put details out in the open so people can see what I'm doing in advance. Most of the people watching my blogs are users I'm reasonably familiar with, so I trust your (I'm assuming you're one of them, reading right now) judgement and honesty if ever you fancy poking at something.
The aim is to do a little something every day - even if only writing a scene or developing an element of the plan - and post a blog update, however vast or small progress is, so people can see what's going on and where it's going.
Please Note:
Baby steps apply here. The story in question isn't what I'd call a passion project, though I'm happy to have whiled away some time on it already. I'm not yet comfortable enough to reveal some of the more ambitious or personal projects I've got tucked away backstage. I think I'll trial a week and see how this experiment is faring then, before deciding whether to extend it further.
Remember, this is an experiment. I make no guarantees as to its success.
In theory, a failed experiment can still be informative (so long as it's not an incompetently designed one), but neither am I trying to make it a failure. If it can get me writing more easily than usual, then it'll be worth the investment of time and effort. If not, then I'll just have to try something else. Producing something for publication is what I'd like to do. But I'm not going to beat myself up over it, nor do I expect (or will I respect) anyone who wants me to.
Lastly, a reminder that this is still my project. I'm open to suggestions, corrections, advice, or just interesting chit-chat, but the decision to implement advice or not rests with me.
Look, I don't want to discourage people from offering something that could be valuable to me, but neither do I want to turn this into a destruction test of my own self-esteem. I appreciate people can disagree civilly - because people do - and opening the doors like this carries risks, but this is my corner of the Internet and I will not tolerate unpleasant and deliberately hostile or passive-aggressive behaviour. I'm here for the pleasure of mixing with the writing community and fellow pony fans, first and foremost. I am not a performing monkey.
Watch This Space
OK, to get back into gear: I'll release a second blog post soon with the first instalment of this week-long experiment. The details of our current test case will be released there and then. I'm just making clear here and now what I'm doing and why.
OK, see you in a bit.
Impossible Numbers, out.
I recall us having an exchange about this once.
This is very much the trick. You encode the information via your head, but it ends up playing in their head. There isn’t even reference hardware for either device; there’s just sort of a loose spec that’s been implemented seven billion different ways by three billion different manufacturers. So it’s less of a literal encoding, and more of a time-delayed attempt to get them to play enough back to hopefully satisfy both of you. Much more of a performance than not, IMO.
But regardless, I hope a new approach will help. I desperately need to get my own writing capabilities back online as well, and may eventually seek something less conventional as a way to do it. I haven’t been able to dance for much of 2020–to say nothing of dancing for an audience. But I still long to dance.
And it’s not as much fun to dance alone.
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And the worst part of it is you're never really privy to how it works in their head unless they want to tell you all about it. It's like dealing with a panel of testers who have only one spokesperson: you're never really sure what's going on behind closed doors.
I think I'm more obsessive than optimistic, though the optimism is definitely there. I don't even feel like I'm hitting an optimum yet, and it's been a couple of years since anything even close to that happened. I just want the good side of writing without the needless frustrations. It's not even as if I'm averse to learning and making mistakes: it's more the tearing-my-hair-out-and-wondering-if-I'm-secretly-fundamentally-bad-at-this stuff I could do without.
Not for long, anyway.
It's like I said: even someone who likes quietly reading in their own house sooner or later relies on other people. The social is strong in our species. 
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I seem to recall a PM exchange back in the waning days of Blue Chameleon.
Hard to believe that was... two years ago now?
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Seems plausible enough, but I'd have to dig up some old notes to check. And yeah, that would have been two years ago.