A Week in the Writing Life, 15 July 2023
Some new stuff cooking.
I’ve been writing a bit this past week, and a lot of it unexpected. We’ll get into it.
Home Front Stuff
Not too much at all to report here. I’ll be on the road with my wife to a wedding this weekend, so that’s a rare trip for us. She’s asked me to promise not to discuss soccer the entire trip up. Since the USMNT just lost to Panama this week, I think I can keep my pledge.
What I’ve Been Writing
With trying to keep up on the blog, getting things ready for the weekend (because I’ll be on the road for at least part of it), I haven’t had much time to get back to work on The Yank Striker 2. I have the feeling I will have to start not worrying about the boring scenes while writing the exciting ones, and that should help me get the story done faster than it has been.
Meanwhile, I’m cooking something else up, fiction-wise.
If you recall last week, I mentioned that while I have been trekking around different places in Iowa promoting my work, I got the idea for a possible book series centered around professional wrestling. Not only have I been sketching out some notes regarding this (yet to be officially named) series, but I’ve also started writing what could be a short prologue or short story set in the world this takes place in.
I started to get really in-depth with describing how this project came about and a few tiny hints about its plot for the newsletter today. However, the description began to get a bit oversized for just one subject.
So, since I wanted to talk up the project anyway, I decided to break off the whole discussion about it and the creative process I went through into a separate post. It’ll post here at noon tomorrow (Sunday) and will be a free read for everyone. I hope everyone enjoys it.
What I’ve Been Doing Having to do With Writing
I just wanted to thank the Slowdown Coffee Co. for being my host last Sunday as part of the Northside Market festival there in the Highland Park district of Des Moines. It was a great experience, a great coffee shop, and I would absolutely love to go back sometime.
I’ll be at the monthly meeting of the Iowa Writers’ Corner today. If you’re a writer who’s interested in being part of a writing community and learning from other writers, definitely come on down. We meet every third Saturday of the month at Felix and Oscars (F&O’s) at 4050 Merle Hay Road in Des Moines starting at 9 a.m. You can check us out on Facebook.
Oh, and there’s a tiny event I’d love to see you at.
I’ll be having my first “Meet the Author” event at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 26, at Beaverdale Books, one of three Iowa bookstores where you can find The Yank Striker in stock. We’ll talk about the book and series, as well as writing in general.
Also, that same day I’ll be having my first ever radio interview with John Busbee and his show The Culture Buzz on KMFG 98.9. The interview should air the day of the event during his regular slot (11 a.m. - 1 p.m.). Heady stuff, for sure.
What I’ve Been Reading/General Recommendations
My inbox has been filling up with good stuff from Substack, but I’m going for a change of pace this week. I grew up with a guy at Muscatine High School named Juan Fourneau. While working in my hometown, he spent 20-plus years as a professional wrestler on the independent circuit. He’s written a memoir about those experiences and a whole mess of other subjects as well. I think he has a good eye for detail and description, among other things.
We were both recently featured in a new collection entitled Roads We’ve Taken: A Writer’s on the Avenue Anthology. He has a great essay in there about how watching the movie Rocky 4 inspired him as a kid, but you should also check out his web site (and his other writings) at https://www.latinthunder1.com/.
Writing Advice for This Week
In the piece I’m going to be running tomorrow about my new project, I talk about those who do a considerable amount of planning for their fiction projects and those who are “pantsers" (another word for flying by the seat of their pants). I come down more on the side of the former group than the latter, although I have seen the benefits of just writing whatever comes to mind and seeing where it takes you.
However, if you are writing anything bigger than, say a novella (which the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Association says should be around 17,500 and 40,000 words), I believe some amount of world-building is going to be required.
To elaborate, exactly what type of organization you choose to use for your project should be up to you. Whenever I’ve taught writing at the high school or junior college level, I’ve always considered this to be part of the prewriting portion of the writing process. I try to expose my students to a variety of prewriting techniques, but the choice of which ones they use to create material I leave in their hands. “Use whatever works for you,” is a frequent instruction of mine.
For example, with this new project I’ll talk about tomorrow, I had an idea of using either a timeline (a list of events in chronological order) covering the events of the story or a family tree (which shows the relationships between a family’s members). In this case, I settled on the family tree, since the entire plot was centered around one particular family. I sketched out the family tree using Microsoft OneNote (which I think I need to review at some point on the blog) where I laid out the family members, their names, and nicknames. I also added the dates of their births and (if applicable) their deaths, and the dates of their marriages. I eventually ended up adding more than 20 characters to the list, so it was a prewriting activity that paid off for me.
There’s times when I feel awkward when I’m giving writing advice. I believe the reason is because when it comes to the craft of writing, there are more general, broad principles to how it works rather than a long checklist of rules1. For example, it made sense for me to make a family tree for the new project because the main character had a sizable family which were the main participants in the story line. However, in another story where there is a smaller family or a main character’s family is not as sizable, such a tree might not make sense. In fact, if my story involves a large number of events, a number of events that coincide with real-life events (as in historical fiction), or a long time period, a timeline may be a better way of sketching out where your story is going.
Thanks for coming to the lecture, everyone. Let me know if there are other writing issues you’d like to discuss in the comments.
Writing Quote of the Week
Since I eventually want to write a fantasy series, I thought a Brandon Sanderson quote might be good for this week. I also find it applies to my own philosophy toward my work as well.
By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry...
Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians
Final Thoughts
And that’s another week in the books. Make sure to check out my Substack at noon Central time tomorrow for my extra post on my newest project - and it’ll be free, too.
As always, check the links in the sidebar and on my author page if you’re looking to buy one of my books. If you buy one, I’d absolutely love it if you could leave a review on Amazon or wherever you get it, because that would be very helpful.
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This idea of general writing principles might be worthy of its own post later on. I’ll keep it in mind.