Over at Slate magazine I found this fascinating article by Jacob Brogan involving an app called Flowstate which has a very unique way of trying to get you to write more…

The Flowstate App Wants To Help You Write Faster

How does Flowstate do this?  Easy: It has a timer and whenever you pause or stop, the work you’ve done begins to fade away.  If you take too long, it’s gone for good.

Now, I understand the idea behind this: Rather than have people pause or hem and haw, this program forces you as a writer to go, go, GO and not pause.  I imagine the thinking is that this will bolster your ability to write quicker and finish what you’re working on.

I can see that.

I can also see that, depending on what you’re writing, its a stupid idea.

If I’m writing a blog post like this one, I tend to get it done relatively quickly.  However, I often have to go back and correct problems, either grammatical or general, to ensure whatever I’ve written makes sense.  Further, there are times when I have to pause to check a website or grab a bit of dialogue or paste an image, etc. etc.

If I were working with Flowstate, I wonder how long it would take me before I rammed some sharp object through my monitor.

It’s even worse when we’re talking about my novels.  If I had to break-down my writing habits with my novels, I’d say I spend maybe 40-60 percent of the time simply thinking about what I’m working on.  I then spend perhaps 30 percent of the time actually writing -taking many breaks here and there to think– and another 10-30 percent of the time revising my work after printing it out.

If I were using something like Flowstate, what I’d be doing is effectively changing my whole method of writing and, it is my belief, I would be doing myself a great disservice.

I hate wasting time writing things that I subsequently have to cut out.  I noted before how some 30,000 words written in my latest novel had to be either eliminated or re-worked to fit the story.  It was during the writing of these words (and they were from different parts of the book) that I was spit-balling, ie taking flights of fancy and seeing where they led.  Usually, to a dead end.  Now imagine I write most of my novel this way!

30,000 words could easily become 60,000 or more!

If you feel a program like this one might help you write more, then by all means give it a try.

The reality is that you will write more if you dedicate yourself to doing just that.  Make the time each day to write and you’ll be surprised when one day you look back and realize you’ve written quite a bit!

Found this interesting article on i09 regarding the new Disney movie Zootopia and how only a year before he movie’s release the writers realized they need to make a “simple” but very big change to the story to make it work:

How Disney Fixed a Huge Mistake with Zootopia Just One Year Before Its Release

The upshot of the article (my apologies for giving up the crux of the story but I’ve tried to be vague about who the changes relate to and, besides, you should read the article anyway!) is that originally the movie’s focus was on one character and, about a year before the movie’s release, the creators/writers realized the movie worked far better if another character was the central character/protagonist of the piece.

As the article put it,

>>In retrospect, the (story) flip may seem like the most simple thing ever.<<

Take it from me, changing the focus of a story is not a “simple” thing at all!

Though the story received a virtual flood of comments (there are over 700 to date), I nonetheless put in my two cents and, though my comment hasn’t been “approved” yet (nor I doubt will be…articles like these are essentially forgotten after a few days), I was nonetheless tickled someone read and liked it enough to star it.  Here is my comment in all its glory…and it features just a little bit of information regarding my latest Corrosive Knights novel as well as comments I’ve made already regarding Mad Max: Fury Road:

Take it from me, when writing, things which “seem” so simple often are not…even if in retrospect the “solution” to your problem quite literally is right in front of you.

I’ve written enough to realize one needs to constantly monitor whatever work one is involved in and equally constantly keep thinking of alternate scenarios. For example, in my latest work, going into the story I had a character pegged as the villain of the piece and for months I wrote the character as such. Suddenly, and after many, many, MANY hours of work I realized the character worked better as an unwitting, though courageous, soul who fought the villainy in the story. I reworked my story (and am in the process of finishing it up) but felt this change worked for the better.

Another example of a story that might have worked better with a “simple” change involves Mad Max: Fury Road. While I think the film as is is damn good, I can’t help but also feel it would have been better had director/co-writer George Miller cut the character of Max entirely from it. Now, before you label me as some kind of nut, understand that I’m a HUGE fan of Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior. In fact, I would say that movie is my all time favorite action film ever and I love the character of Max.

However, I believe Mr. Miller and company obviously started writing Fury Road with the idea of making a new Mad Max film but in the writing process grew more and more interested in the Furiosa character and her story. Because they were invested in making a “Mad Max” film, they kept the Max character around even when, in my opinion, the story no longer needed him and, worse yet, took away from the focus of the story, which was the character of Furiosa and her journey to redemption.

Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

For those interested in the mechanics of writing, this is indeed a “teaching” type moment.  As a writer, you can -and often do!- get a form of creative “tunnel vision”.  You may start a story thinking you’re going to accomplish A, B, C, and D but wind up mixing up the order and adding many new elements and coming out with C, A, X, and Y.

In some ways this may explain the notion/statement from some authors the characters “spoke” to them and maybe they, as writers, “followed” them rather than creatively writing.

The notion that a story or character takes over from you, the writer, is bullshit, by the way.

As a writer, YOU come up with the scenarios and YOU make the subsequent changes.  YOU are the one that realizes things work or don’t and YOU are the one that ultimately decides to move in other directions when you see they work better than the direction you may have originally considered.

As time passes I stand more and more firmly behind my statement regarding Mad Max: Fury Road.  I strongly suspect Mr. Miller and Company started writing the movie as a “Mad Max” film but somewhere along the line they grew to love the character of Furiosa to the extent that she became the movie’s central character.  In a perfect world, I suspect Mr. Miller and company would have cut Max out of that film entirely and made an original “Apocalyptic” Mad Max-type film with Furiosa as the one and only lead character.

However, because we are talking about making an expensive studio movie and you need financial backing, its easier to ask for and receive backing if you come in saying this will be a “Mad Max” film rather than a “Apocalyptic Mad Max-type film featuring a new lead female character” and therefore they kept the Max character in the film even though his presence was unnecessary.

As for my own work mentioned above, I did indeed start my latest Corrosive Knights novel with the intention of a certain character being the primary villain but realized, over time, he made more sense as a sympathetic character who is forced to work and witness the evil around him first hand.

A simple change…that required “fixing,” ie changing completely, many, many hours and days and weeks worth of work!

A couple of weeks ago I read an article about the November Writing Challenge (you can sign up for it here, but 10 days have already passed!).  In essence, the challenge is to write an at least 50,000 word novel in the month.

No, I didn’t sign up for the challenge.  I’m knee deep in book #6 of the Corrosive Knights saga and the last thing I need to do is distract myself from it for a month writing another work.

When I read about the challenge, perhaps on io9.com or somewhere like it, I was fascinated by the commentary section and the various bits of advice people gave would-be authors accepting the challenge.  Though I wish I could find the actual comments, one in particular, which I’ll paraphrase below (sorry, don’t have the actual quote handy), struck me as interesting:

Leave things where they lie and write forward.  Do not go back and revise, rather write around what you originally put down.

In the context of writing a 50,000 novel in a month’s time, this is good advice.  Because of the nature of the challenge you don’t want to get stuck repeatedly going over sections of your book and/or rewriting great parts of it as the deadline looms large.

But as the advice presented is framed towards this particular writing challenge, its easy to point out it doesn’t relate to the type of novels I write.

Of course, I can’t speak about other authors.  If you are to accept what Stephen King wrote in his book On Writing, he claims to write exactly one draft of his novels, puts it away for a little while to “mellow out”, then goes over it one time before it is ready to be published.  Given the copious amounts of books he releases, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is indeed the case, that he writes along the lines of the advice presented above and then moves on to the next work.

As much as I wish I could write like that (oh, the number of books I’d have out there by now!), that’s not the way I do it.

I’ve posted bits and pieces of information on my writing here and there and I’ll likely do so again in the future.  For me, writing is not unlike creating an oil painting.

The painter starts with an idea of what it is they want to paint.  Perhaps it is a landscape or a city.  Perhaps a person or group of people.  You have some ideas of how things will fit together and you come up with a rough drawing.  Depending on how good you are, the drawing is done quickly or, more than likely, you work out spaces and where things lie on your canvas.

Your original idea(s) likely change during this stage, sometimes radically.  After a bit of work you reach a point where you have your drawing down on the canvas (if you do things that way) and you’re ready to lay down colors.  During this process of blending colors together you may have additional discoveries, either done on purpose or found by accident, which step by step further fill in your work. When you’re done, the picture you’ve created may well be very far from what you originally envisioned but if you’re successful, what you’ve completed is far, far better than that original concept.

So it is for me with writing a novel.  Usually I start out with a few rough ideas.  I may have a concept of a novel’s beginning and its end or maybe both and then have to come up with what lies between.  Rarely do I have ideas of things that happen somewhere in the middle of the book.

As for characters, I usually have an idea of the ones I want to use and their interactions, but this is often subject to change.

In the case of the Corrosive Knights novel I’m currently writing, I started out with an idea of the novel’s beginning, though this wasn’t set in stone, and its end, which was far better defined.

When I started writing the book and, unlike the advice presented above, I would very often go back over my work as I realized certain plot points worked better another way.  This is how I wound up with almost 30,000 words of material which I may wind up discarding completely.

A waste of time?  Most certainly, but the overall work is better for these unused experiments…if nothing else, they made me realize I needed to do better.

Returning to the characters, the original big bad villain of the piece, I realized, was better served being heroic (though not the novel’s hero).  Further, I added chunks of information originally conceived for the next book in the Corrosive Knights series but which I realized worked better in this one.  These chunks of information fill in historical blanks that finally give the series the 20,000 plus year history I was intent on telling.

Sometimes I wish I could transport back in time and with my latest novel in hand and present it to myself as I was beginning the work.  How would I react to being in the novel’s embryonic stage and then seeing it presented in full?  How would I react to the knowledge that the journey begun with a few small ideas would flower into something so full?

And after admiring the work done, I’d just have to tell myself who won the upcoming Super Bowl.

Might be worth a few more bucks! 😉