Drawing from the Well
This week has seen some movement on the character profiles. I finished 3 more profiles, which isn’t much compared to how many I have to do, but it was also a very busy week. I’m putting more focus on it this week and hoping to get many more of them done. That said, the process is reacquainting me with some of the deep truths about characters I’ve been writing for years. It’s good stuff going into Book 3.
5/24 Major Character Profiles Complete
0/89 Side Character Profiles Complete
Filling the Well
I made it through another four books this week and they were all good. I finished Broken Throne (amazing to be back in that world), read all of the Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding and the Last Life of Prince Alastor (a duology, super-satisfying), and Witchmark (difficult to get into but enthralling all the same). I’m starting the follow-up to Witchmark, Stormsong, today. I love reading good books, especially by favorite authors. Those are like coming home.
83/100 for #ProjectBookworm2021
Well Chat
For me, writing, as well as life in general, can be a huge mess. There are so many objectives, variables, and personalities involved in every moment of life that I can easily lose the details to the whole (or even the whole entirely). The way I make sense of things is by breaking them down. This applies most vividly to my writing. When I described it to a coworker several years ago, he said it sounded like First Principles, so I did some research and figured out that this is the way I think.
You’re probably asking what First Principles are. This article goes into more detail on it, but the crux of it is to break ideas down into their fundamental components that can be taken as truth. From there, you can build up to understand ideas, concepts, and objects of increasing difficulty and complexity. Furthermore, you can take those simple elements and recombine them to create something altogether new.
How does this relate to how I process life and my writing? Well, everything is built in levels. People are made of cells which are made of compounds which are made of molecules composed of atoms built by subatomic particles (physics goes further than that but I don’t understand it beyond protons, neutrons, and electrons). Life is the same. Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Nation, branch, department, team, individual. Home, room, component, material. Everything is built on smaller pieces.
Goals are the same: Big Hairy Audacious Goal, Project, Deliverable, Segment, Task. Breaking down something like launching a business to individual tasks can eliminate the intimidation that comes with BHAGs. My writing is much the same. My literary universe idea in my head is a BHAG. That universe, and its big plan, are built on books, both standalone and series. Each series is then built on individual books. Those books are composed of multiple character arcs, each of which I divide into eight major events. Those events are connected with what I call “connective tissue” but are also made of that same tissue. Those story pieces then become chapters built on scenes of multiple paragraphs containing multiple sentences composed of many words. That means that each word I choose is one tiny subatomic particle (or quark – see, I know what some of this stuff is called, I just don’t understand it all) that helps build up to the whole book, the bigger picture.
What this means for my day-to-day work is that I am made of checklists. Whenever I’m doing a long-tail task, I make a checklist. My wife teases me for how quickly I’ll whip up a spreadsheet but it’s accurate. Those checklists serve two purposes: 1) I can see the scope of my goal and contain the chaos and 2) I get the feeling of achievement each time I check off a task from the list. Checklists don’t work for everyone. Like my son hates them. He just wants to dive in and work until the work is done. And that’s fine. I don’t understand it but I don’t have to. I just have to understand what works for me. You have to understand what works for you.
So how do you approach your writing, your goals? How do you contain the chaos and transmute it into success? Tell me your dreams and how you climb the mountain.
This was the last topic I had prepared long ago so we’ll see what I come up with next week. Be well everyone.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG