Karen Traviss, New York Times best-selling author

Uncreative writing

This is one of the most useful links you'll ever click on.

DIY Planner takes some time to explore, but it's a treasure trove of stuff - free stuff - for the organisationally-minded.  It's also paper-based. Now, I like my techie gadgets as much as the next geek with too much disposable income; but sometimes only pen and paper will do. I first stumbled across DIYP when I was trying to find storyboard blanks for a Circa notebook in the days before Levenger did them, and while it's perfectly possible to create your own templates - as I do - it's pretty handy to find so many here  prêt à utiliser.

I'm not, as many of you already know, a wildly creative, hippy-dippy free spirit of the arts. I'm an observer, analyst, and extrapolator. The only way I get to the unexpected places that I go in fiction is by a long but very rapid chain of what's-that, who-says-so, and what-if; so I'm not going to be the writer who comes up with - to borrow a phrase from the excellent Zero Punctuation - a rifle that shoots shurikens, because my brain never wants to go down that path. Hence the DIY Planner thing; I like lists. Filing stuff is fun too. Spreadsheets and RACI matrices are the stuff of comfort and reassurance for me.

I mention this because - back in the Clarion day - I thought I didn't have the artistic imagination to write successfully. I think it was that awful phrase creative writing that did it. I never had crazy out-of-left-field ideas like other folks seemed to. But then I discovered that a wild imagination wasn't what was needed, and things fell into place when I just went with my natural tendency to want to analyze the shit out of everything and everyone. So if you're stuck in some class being told that you have to be "imaginative" to write fiction, and you find you just aren't wired that way, then don't let them dismiss you or talk you out of writing.

The only thing you have to be able to imagine is what it's like to be someone else and live in their head in the small detail of life. Because that's the heart of characterisation. And you need only three skills to achieve that; patient observation, self-awareness, and the willingness to accept that the rest of the world doesn't see things the way you do.  That's bloody hard for most people at the best of times, and we have the wars to prove it, but if you can manage it then you just don't need off-the-wall ideas.  You don't need to be able to imagine wacky things that others can't; you need to be able to see the things they never do until it's pointed out to them.

Writing fiction is about making the invisible visible. And there are plenty of ways of reaching that point.

 

 

 

 

 

Technicalities

It must have been like this when Ug first thought of the wheel, and was stuck at the maybe-I-need-to-file-the-corners-off stage.

I've been forced to migrate blogs without technical support - not something I wanted to take on given my camel-crushing workload, so I'm having to do it a step at a time. All the material from my previous blogs has beenstripped out and downloaded in importable file formats, and I now have content management via the same app that I use for the web site.

So the wheel is sort of octagonal and giving me a bumpy ride, but at least it looks more like a wheel now than a square plate. I can haul the occasional mammoth with it.

Soon, there will be a full archive, and eventually, the web site embedding will be seamless. Eventually, it'll be a Firestone steel radial. I swear.

The game plan for the blog is this;  I'll update Mondays and Fridays. Content will be whatever takes my fancy - usually business, sometimes apoplexy about world affairs, sometimes complete loss of judgment on my part that simply has to vent through a fissure - but it's unlikely that I'll be opening the blog to comments for some time, if at all. I now work on the principle that if anyone really wants to have a dialogue with me, I'm easy to contact. The general tendency of comments sections across the entire internet to degenerate to the very lowest common denominator of me-too-hey-look-how-big-I-am graffiti for the benefit of onlookers rather than to have a conversation has convinced me this is a sensible move. As has the fact that I pay for bandwidth.

So...on to the next stage. And I have to crack on with the current manuscript-in-progress.  It's possibly a sign that I've crammed not only a lifetime career's worth of books into the small crack between 2004 and 2008, but also the equivalent amount of oh-hell-not-that-again ennui and general piss-offedness. When I come to a job on the list that I don't relish writing, I treat it like the cauliflower I have to finish before I can dig in to the more appealing mound of carrot and swede mash. By keeping my eye on the mash, and maybe adding a lot of nutmeg and grated cheese to the cauli, I can get through it.

Mmmm...cauliflower.

 

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Gordon's lucky day.

The blog is back after a long break.  December 31st 2006, if I recall. Boy, a lot of water's rushed under the bridge since then.

I swear I'm not going to waste any blogwidth this time around telling the world what a dickhead Gordon Brown is.  That would be kicking a man when he's down, and frankly there's no better time to aim for the soft and vulnerable bits, but...this is costing me money.  So whatever I said about Bliar on my last blog 18 months ago can simply be repeated about Gordon and his team of losers and mediocre housewives. A pox on them all, sirrah. And this blog is about my business, which is writing fiction.

I have, at long last, started writing a comic series. No details until both I and the editor are sure that this isn't going to be a crash-and-burn mistake on my part, because I have much further to fall these days; but it's fun to have a storyboard on my desk again. I haven't storyboarded since my good old steam-driven TV days, when men were men and the BBC had balls too.  I'm a visual writer anyway - for me, writing is transcribing a soundtrack and video of events I can see running in my brain - but actively thinking in stills and freeze frames exercises slightly different mental muscles even from TV-think.

There's a lot to be said for working across different media. Working with games teams - Epic and LucasArts - gave me a whole new set of storytelling tools that I carry across to the printed word. The same is true of comics. It fits comfortably into what I've always seen in my head as a three-dimensional, multi-layered thing called Story.

It'll be an interesting learning curve, if nothing else. I don't read fiction, and I've throughly analysed how I can write novels while not being remotely interested in reading, and I know exactly how I can write games-based fiction without playing games. But this is the first time I've created something in a medium in which I'm a consumer - unless you count TV, that is.

 

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