Re-reading this a week later, I’m pretty pleased with it. Rough edges and some dodgy stylings, but I’m getting there. Might be able to acquire a fiction writing habit after all.
Conversation
That’s my main focus right now, ingraining and stabilizing what is still a very unnatural way of writing for me so that it is fun at process level, sentence by sentence, spot edit by spot edit. Not merely at output and audience reaction level.
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Goal is to get to routinely get to publishable complete draft of ~2000-4000 words in a day. It’s the only way for me. If I can’t go from zero to publish of a bit of writing in a single day, it’s not sustainable for me. Gotta day-chunk relatively stand alone bits.
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This means first dump has to be mostly right. Like 80%. Ie 8 out of 10 words, 8 out of 10 sentences, 8 out of 10 paragraphs have to be right enough for me to hit publish on. Only ~20% can be marked for rewrites/development otherwise I’ll lose my “eye” for the piece and motivation
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One of the reasons I’ve been able to stay steadily at 2000-4000 words of nonfiction/week nearly continuously for ~15 years is
a) My QA standards are mediocre, I’m easily pleased with myself
b) I can hit 80% QA pass with first dump and get to hitting publish in a day
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Almost every piece I’ve ever written was done in a day sprint, which is why ~4K words at 80% first-draft QA pass is my sweet spot. Every night break doubles the probability of abandoning the thing. So larger things have to evolve as weak-ties networks of day size chunks.
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On the flip side, I can’t really outline, so the day-sized chunks tend to be stream of consciousness nuggets with only cosmetic sub-structuring. Kinda like prime numbers computed in-memory in a single uninterrupted process session.
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Porting this weird process to fiction is hard since fiction has more demanding constraints and high minimum size (hard to compress a decent story-like thing to less than 2k). And my stream of consciousness hit rate in fiction is far short of critical 80% needed for sustainability
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Part of it is an “awkward golf swing” type fingerspitzengefuhl gap, and partly it’s what I can only call the “holographic constraint” of writing: the whole has to infuse each part, but if you learn the whole before you actually write it, you lose interest. Or I do at least.
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I think this is why fiction writers love story structure models (hero’s journey, 3-act, 5-act, save the cat, Harmon circle, wind-up archetypes…). It’s a way to get enough of a sense of the whole so you can write without derailing, but not so much you can’t be bothered to finish.
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There’s also the micro-level heuristics like “the South Park guys’ connect beats/scenes with ‘but’ rather than ‘and’ heuristic, which Matthew Dicks also uses) and Johnstone’s Impro model of layering in callbacks.
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I’m convinced the basic challenge of writing fiction is to translate space into time. You take a design that takes shape gradually in space, with both teleological and causal forcing, and find a way to serialize it in “writing time” with minimal look ahead/look back.
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Outlining kills this process for me. I have to discover the story as I write it. But I’m learning I don’t have to discover it in the same order of state updates a reader will. My first 10% may be beginning, ending, and leitmotifs, not the first 10% of the serialized text.
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The writing state can be pretty compact, but need not be local in the working text. Feels like a stack where I’m initially pushing a lot more than I’m popping in first 2/3 of the writing, the popping more than pushing in last 1/3. Kinda like the execution of a recursion program.
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The trick to writing with low-error autotelic flow is to keep the right 7-8 chunks of state from different parts of the story in your head as you write. The set changes slowly, and the “story structure” is often a good initial state set, even if you haven’t filled it in.
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I am not seeing discrete stages or rewrite “passes” in my process so far. But it does seem to move overall from skeleton to organs to circulation, to skinning. But it’s not strictly ordered. Bits of skin might snap into place before major bits of skeleton.
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It’s more like painting with words than nonfiction. Or like building code, or mechanical assembly. The closest similar thing I’ve ever learned to do is actually CAD, not nonfiction.
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The part I usually have the most trouble with is names, since they are cosmetic elements with skeletal consequences. I can’t do arbitrary naming any more than I can do outlining. The payoff from finding the True Name for a character or object or place is a high spike.
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Good names are like chunks of protein. They cause discontinuous jumps in the “holographic density” of whatever you’re writing. They’re also the aha! payoffs of the writing process for me. If I don’t find good enough names along the way to finishing a piece, it’s just not fun.
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You’ll notice that the half dozen or so stories I’ve published so far have few to no named entities in them. The quoted latest one at the top of the thread has zero. A good kpi for me might be number of true-named things/1000 words. Gonna try to drive that up.
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Trying to finish a story with meaningless placeholder names and then finding names is like eating a chocolate chip cookie with placeholder pebbles and then eating a handful of chips. The writing is not fun at all, and I’m convinced the output is weak.
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I’d rather write compromised pseudo-stories with no names than phoned-in names. They don’t have to brilliant like “Hercule Poirot” or “Lilliput” but they have to be impedance matched to the story, and kinda have a bit of holographic sparkle. Bring out the character of the story.
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It’s going to be mostly rough and unpolished things for a while. I have some ambitious things sorta sketched out that I’ll polish and finish more, but am still working up to the strength to actually tackle them. So the stuff I’m putting out now is closer to studies/storyboards
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Simply learning a new skill at basic level is not hard, but installing it as a long-term habit with motivation plumbing at all levels of behavior and personalized stabilization… very hard.
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