Magic Practice
It began with an old man, mean books, and a giant bird. I'm still discovering the rest.
My youngest child gifted me with a pack of Narata storytelling cards some years ago, which are one of many prompt-generating products out there. I used them to come up with the core ideas behind my current WIP, and from that seed, a strange and twisted tree grew... and that's cool, because I'm a fan of strange and twisted. And funny. As I mentioned in the previous post, Big Serious Work often gives way to Leavened With Humor. I'm not able to fight it, so I have learned to embrace it.
What I'm also learning is the act of enlargement, growth, expansion... how to take that man/books/bird core idea and write out a narrative that is interesting, doesn't explain too much, but also doesn't hide too much, if that makes any sense. Writing that delights me is a magic trick, a diverting of expectations and attention with flourishes and misdirections that still results in delight. "How did they do that?" What the audience doesn't see is the hours of practice and prep that goes into the trick. The grueling sessions in front of a mirror, getting the patter down just right, moving the hands to make the coin jump from here to there without any intervening motion. It helps, I'm sure, to know what the trick is supposed to look like.
I use writing as a way to break out of the structures of my career, a field that, like magic, requires some expectation of "I know what this looks like when it's done." And like magic, a lot of grueling practice offstage to pull it off, so to speak. If I'm doing my career-job well, you're not noticing the work behind it. With the job, that's done with specs and plans and mockups, feature lists and user stories and validation tests. Writing can take the same direction, and for a long while I translated that day-job mindset to the writing: detailed outlines, or at least scaffolding, with specific moments and scenes laid out. Everything laid out in advance, with little room for chance or variation, just a workmanlike to-do list.
That was fine, and if that's your approach, it is completely fine. In my hands, it was stifling, and my characters revolted and insisted on a new direction. Now I'm taking a more relaxed approach, the "gardening" or "pantser" approach (as in flying-by-the-seat-of) and discovering as I go. And I've found a lot out, in that story about a man and his books and a bird. I've got a second narrative going, one that lets me avoid the info-dump, that introduces opportunities for dialogue (difficult, in a one-character piece), and which, I hope, rounds the whole story out, making the plot jump from here to there in a way that looks magical. But wow, is it slow going.
🧩🦏