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Many tech startup founders stumble because despite having an innovative product idea. They lack ingrained banal business discipline. A tech startup business has to be a business first, otherwise it risks ending up as a VC-subsidized scam. A sci-fi story has to be a story first.
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I've run a 1-person small business for nearly a decade now, but I don't think I could do a tech startup. I lack both the ambition and risk appetite, and sufficiently big ideas to base a business on. With fiction I have the reverse problem.
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I have a bunch of sci-fi ideas in draft stage, but am very impatient about learning and practicing the basic storytelling skills 🤬 I have zero interest in telling ordinary non-sci-fi stories 🤣
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Most useful sources for fiction so far: - Impro by Johnstone - The MICE model in Orson Scott Card book - Save the Cat (color by numbers Campbell) - Reading like a writer by Francine Prose - Archetypes for Writers by Jenifer van Bergen Damon Knight: creating short fiction
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In a way, the switch from non-fiction to fiction feels hard in the same way switching from procedural to OO and more structured paradigms felt hard. I never successfully learned OO or declarative styles besides bits and pieces, and never even tried functional.
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This could also be why I found Impro to be the most directly useful in fiction writing attempts. It's a sort of kayfabe non-fiction simulation in your head that you then "report" as fiction. Anything more structured sorta kneecaps me. I'm 10x more pantser than plotter.
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A more practical problem is that fiction basically takes 10x more time per word than non-fiction of comparable quality (and poetry takes 100x more time per word). So I just don't have the time to produce the volume I need to tell the stories I have drafted :D
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A general heuristic for any kind of writing is that it's like weight training. Your highest volume output (like say your newsletter or blog) is generally at about 70% your one-rep max quality. Which means you have to overtrain your target zone.
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If you want to write blog quality nonfiction, train on journal level writing for ORM. If you want to write genre fiction, train on literary fiction for ORM. If you want to write literary fiction, train on poetry for ORM. If you want to write poetry, get an undemanding real job.
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This fits the business vs. tech startup analogy. A regular, non-innovation small business like a coffee shop or restaurant takes MORE raw hard work to run profitably because you lack innovation leverage. But it trains you.
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I have a couple of decent stories on ribbonfarm, but the easiest fiction I've written is actually a flow-hack... on where half the issues are kinda silly didactic fiction around an absurdist consultant world. It's mediocre quality, but the thing is it flowed out easily.
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I probably have about a novella worth of words there, like 20k. I have the final chapter to write, after which a winter project is editing the whole thing into an ebook, which will be my first kinda-fiction book. We'll see how it goes.
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The frontispiece of Reality Hunger by David Shields quotes the best line on fiction I've ever read: "All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one." I don't care about "great" but I find that genre-creative-destruction is where words flow easiest for me.
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My art of gig yakverse fiction may not be great, but it does dissolve/invent a genre -- absurdist consultant fiction with elements of sci-fi and fantasy but base content being basic airport-business-book style business ideas. It's the only one of it's kind I know of.
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Also bits of murder mystery. There's such a thing as consultant fiction but afaik I'm the only one who's gone down this particular genre-bending bunnytrail.
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One of my suspicions is that for my more ambitious drafts that I want to put more work into, the unblocking move will be finding the genre-busting tweak. Right now, the drafts are pretty much pure-paradigm sci-fi plots.
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In my first flirtation with fiction ~20y ago (which I've since deleted from online), the flow-inducing mashup was first-person regular fiction + cookbooks + lyric books. I had segments with literal recipes and song fragments in them. Again not great, but it flowed.
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Dunno about the rest of you, but for me flow is key. If the words don't flow at near the physical limit of typing speed and physical endurance, it's not working for me. Until I can unlock that flow rate, the writing lacks both quantity and quality of words. Minimum viable flow.
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Ground-truthing this thread... I've written probably a couple of million words of non-fiction, and maybe 50k words of fiction in my life (publicly published that is). I've never directly made money off fiction though. Art of gig doesn't count since it is a nonfiction trojan horse
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