Bradbury, and What's Keeping You...? Part 1
In Today's Journal
* Ludicrous Quote of the Day
* The Bradbury Challenge Writers Reporting
* Blackwell Ops 34: Solomon Payne
* What's Keeping You...? Part 1
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Ludicrous Quote of the Day
in which an unintentional fear-peddler asks seemingly innocently,
"What’s keeping you from finishing—or starting—your story?" Opening sentence of a Writer's Digest newsletter article titled "Five Steps to an Airtight Plot" (Tiffany Yates Martin, Feb 13, 2024)
What's Keeping Me
I could pretty much chew wheels and spit nails. I didn't get to start a new novel yesterday (not that important) because a small group of Neanderthalian troglodytes spent most of the day shashing away at a small copse of mesquites on a slight rise that for decades has served as a safe place for quail, rabbits, roadrunners, and javelinas.
Of course, in typical slash-and-gash human fashion, they did all of that with chainsaws and a front-end loader. Right outside the window of the Hovel.
It made me want to call my buddy TJ Blackwell and have him send a guy down. Seriously. But I checked. Incredibly, the law says you're not allowed to shoot people like that. Go figure. Anyway, that's what's keeping me.
The Bradbury Challenge Writers Reporting
The whole point of the Challenge is to have fun and grow as a writer.
There is no cost. The only requirement is to write at least one short story per week.
During the past week, in addition to whatever other fiction they’re writing, the following writers reported these new stories:
Balázs Jámbor "Signs of the times" 1700 urban fantasy
Vanessa V. Kilmer "Quinn's Wish" 1579 Romance
Harvey Stanbrough "A Sure Thing" 4771 Exotic Fantasy
Harvey Stanbrough "A Sure Thing 2" 5140 Exotic Fantasy
Dave Taylor "A Little Bit to Think About!” 2,397 paranormal
Bradbury on Steroids
This one requires you to write at least two short stories per week.
Christopher Ridge "Slice Slice Kitchen Bites" 2083 horror
Christopher Ridge "Cancel" 1383 horror
Congratulations to all of these writers!
(Personal to KH, PD et al. You can join in the Challenge any time. Maybe today's issue of TNDJ will help. See "What's Keeping You" below.)
Blackwell Ops 34: Solomon Payne
My latest novel, which I finished only the day before yesterday, is published and available for download at Blackwell Ops 34: Solomon Payne.
If you prefer to buy from the rich guys at Amazon, Apple, Kobo, B&N, and other vendors, it is also available as a preorder everywhere ebooks are sold. BO-34 will go live at those sites for 99¢ more on February 1.
What's Keeping You...? Part 1
Yeah, this is about the Quote of the Day. That opening sentence was also the subject line of the email that arrived in my inbox yesterday from Writer's Digest newsletter.
When I read that subject line, my first thought was "Hold my beer and watch this." (grin) That's when I thought I'd offer it up to you today as the Ludicrous Quote of the Day.
I call it ludicrous because writing is nothing more than a physical act.
No, don't say "but." Writing, including writing fiction, is only the physical act of putting words on the page. It's nothing any more important than that. As DWS says, writing fiction should be no more difficult than responding to an email.
If you just write the story and choose NOT to engage in doing all the crap the writing 'gurus' want you to do, NOTHING'S keeping you from writing and finishing. You just write.
In fact, if you DO buy the gurus' silly myth-ridden books, they will actively teach you how to do everything BUT write. Did you get that? They'll teach you everything BUT how to actually put new words on the page:
They'll teach you how to outline or mind-map or plot.
They'll teach you how to revise and how to rewrite and how to find a critique group.
They'll teach you how to seek and find an agent, and an editor (or god-forbid a "developmental" editor).
And they'll teach you how to invoke your conscious, critical mind and second-guess your creative subconscious.
Why? Because the longer they can keep you at Stage One or Two as a writer, the more books and courses and workshops they can sell you and the more they can teach you about how NOT to actually write fiction. And the longer they can keep you at Stage One or Two as a writer, and the ugly cycle continues.
So when they ask "What's keeping you from writing or finishing your fiction?" the truly legitimate answer is, "Um, all this other crap you keep trying to foist on me. I don't WANT to be an outliner and a plodder and a reviser and a rewriter. I want to write. Go away, and take all that useless, time-wasting crap you're peddling with you!"
Okay, that was fun for me. But the truth is, those folks are peddling safety nets, and in doing that they're peddling fear.
There's nothing to fear in writing fiction.
Writing short stories and novellas and novels is just a way to entertain yourself and eventually your reader. It just a little fun. Nothing more serious than that. And it's certainly nothing to fear.
So again, nothing's actually keeping you from writing or finishing except the fear you invite on yourself. If you want to write fiction, sit down and write fiction. Believe in yourself. It really is that easy.
By the way, even only the first paragraph of that WD newsletter (and Ms. Martin's February 2024 article) was literally riddled with the myths and fears that are part of the ongoing negative reinforcement American society hands out as writing advice to would-be fiction writers.
Here's the whole paragraph:
"What’s keeping you from finishing—or starting—your story? Maybe all your great ideas get muddled as you’re drafting and you can’t figure out what’s intrinsic to the story or what should happen when. Maybe your outline that seemed so perfectly planned out simply isn’t coming together on the page. Maybe you just lose steam and are thinking of abandoning the story altogether."
"What's keeping you from finishing or even starting your story" is all the garbage they're trying to feed you in the last three sentences of that paragraph.
Again, they're peddling fear. In an offhand way, they're encouraging you write, but cautiously, fearfully, lest something bad should happen to you. Don't buy it. Or now that you have bought it, shake it off and get back to telling stories.
And don't feel alone. All of us have succumbed to the myths at one time or another. The myths are just that pervasive.
Those myths and fears are why I, having written my first short story at age 5 or 6, didn't start writing fiction in earnest until I was 62 years old.
Please don't let them do that to you.
I'll be back tomorrow to break down the last three sentences of that bullying paragraph and reveal the myths hidden barely beneath the veneer of the "help" they're trying to give you.
Talk with you again then.
Of Interest
Karen Woodward I happened across this site yesterday. You might want to check it out. But take any writing advice with a grain of salt. She's written only three books, and none of them are novels.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 1200
Writing of Blackwell Ops 35:
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date…… XXXXX
Fiction for January…………………… 48891
Fiction for 2025………………………. 48891
Nonfiction for January……………….. 13360
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 13360
2025 consumable words…………….. 62251
Average Fiction WPD (January)……. 4074
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 1
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 3
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..... 105
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 274
Short story collections……………………. 29
Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.
All right, here is my take on the What's Keeping you, and the people peddling their courses...I could be totally wrong, but I like to think that most of the time I'm pretty optimistic.
There are a whole group of people that those courses are perfect for. The not very creative, average IQ people. The "workers" of the world, that you may have met in Basic Training, or that you rarely see out and about in the world, because their heads are down doing their work. They watch their sports and cheer for their team, they have their beer after work, they mow grass and maybe go to the lake on Sunday. And every once in a while, they hear a cool story from another average Joe, or they watch a show and something catches their attention as "new" or "different" and they want to write it down because the guys at the café, or feed store aren't interested.
So, they need a set of instructions, just like in school, or just like those given by their coach on their high school sports team, because that is the only way they know how to do things. And so, those courses give them the step by step that they are used to in order to do something that they are not naturally inclined to do.
Bright, creative people tend to forget (or maybe not even realize) that most people aren't like them, with a story in every drop of water and falling leaf. The average Joe, sees leaves that have to be raked to fit the HOA's requirements, and rain (or a leaky faucet) that is keeping them from going to the lake to fish.
Most average Joes won't finish the courses to actually write that spark of story because it's WAY too much work outside of their wheelhouse. But, there are some folks that think they are average Joes, but they keep on plowing through, and eventually the shell cracks and more creativity starts growing out, and then the shell falls away completely. Then the scaffolding of those courses falls away, as well, and they hop and flap and jump and run and fly into the wide open sky of possibilities.
It reminds me a little of the core story of Jonathon Livingston Seagull.
Congrats to everyone who met their goals this week! That's a great feeling.
Harvey, what is exotic fantasy? (your short story genre).
I keep wanting to create new genres (since my fiction never seems to entirely fit) or mash a couple together like DWS does with titles. I guess I could do that in the keyword section of publishing, or in the book description...