Show, don't tell

So, Equestria Daily (a FiM fandom site) has what they call The Editor's Omnibus for fanfiction authors submitting to their site. In this Omnibus is a section called Show vs. Tell. In this section is the first time I've seen someone actually explain what that old adage means.

Show, don't tell.

The Omnibus sets a small scene for us, and gives an example of telling and an example of showing. Guess which example is vastly superior? The showing, of course. And as I said, this is the first time I've seen the "show, don't tell" principle actually explained. It was very eye-opening for me.

Here's a link, if you want to check it out:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WMMs8H-GpFIXPsQeC0RNu8V-Cq6uyGl_UERpOUK_6KY/edit?pli=1#heading=h.6qkzsww2jkrr

So, I haven't been around for a while...

But I haven't been slacking on the writing. No, sadly I haven't been working on the story I spoke of in my previous post, although that's on my list of things to write.

Nope, I've been writing My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction.

Shut up. I'm awesome.

It happened like this: April happens to be the month of Script Frenzy. Well, I got that story idea discussed in my previous post right before Frenzy started, so I knew I'd have to shunt it aside for at least a month. Then the question of what to write for Script Frenzy came up. At the same time, one of my friends was asking about the possibility of me writing some FiM fanfiction, and I thought, hey, two birds with one stone, right?

So I wrote about sixty pages of a script. I hated it. Not the story, the format. My stories are meant to be novels, or short stories, not scripts. Script is not a format I enjoy writing in, at all. So why was I doing Script Frenzy at all? Let us just say a cute girl was involved and leave it at that.

So I stopped at sixty pages. But the story wanted to keep coming. Well, I'm not one to deny my muse when it's actually trying to motivate me. So I novelized the story. I rewrote the sixty pages of script, ending up with about 40 pages of story (although I'm not entirely caught up yet, and an entire sideplot got tossed for being stupid).

I also got inspired to write a second story about one of my favorite side characters in the series, Princess Luna, ruler of the night and formerly the evil Nightmare Moon.

I've done more writing in the last month than I have since the last time I finished NaNoWriMo. This is despite finding a new job that cut out much of my free time.

Anyway, one last thing before I go. FiMFiction.net, the site where I post my FiM fics, has a blog feature. Now, I don't intend to replace this blog as my primary outlet for writing-related content, but I had a writing blog post to write that was relevant to that site, so I posted it there. Here is a link to that blog post (non-bronies need not fear, I don't actually talk about ponies in that post, I just squee about the high quality of a certain story and then ramble about one of my goals as a writer).

What's that? That right there is a rough map of a quaint little world named Arwei. To give you a sense of scale, that continent is about the size of North America. That blue blob on the left is the shining kingdom of Arulia, and the deep red blob on the right is the dark empire of Kulth.

And this is no Bob Ross painting, no happy little continent here. For millennia the knights of Arulia and the hordes of Kulth have waged war on each other, every generation or so they gear up and prepare for another epic battle of good versus evil. The battlefield? All those smaller nations between them. The rolling plains of the north bear the scars of grand magical battles stretching from horizon to horizon. The mountainous south plays host to armies and hordes and hosts as the two superpowers slug it out.

Those little countries? They're sick of it. Every time war comes, they take the brunt of the damage. Every time war comes, they get brushed aside as their lands are ravaged and their people conscripted for the cause. They can't even see the difference between Arulia and Kulth anymore, except one side wears shiny armor and the other side has bad breath.

It is time to make a stand.

Arulia and Kulth are gearing up again. The knights march and the hordes trample. Queen Sereni, ruler of that green blob called Ruthok sandwiched between the two giants, makes the first move in retaliation. Soon she is gathering allies among the other small nations, and engaging in a war that sweeps across the entire continent. The last war. They will settle this good versus evil business once and for all, and both sides are going to regret it.

Stories vs Scenes

So, I have realized something about myself. I am fantastic at writing scenes. I am terrible at writing stories.

I can evoke emotions, induce wonder and awe, and create tension.

But I cannot tie things together with a strong plot. I don't have a story, I have a series of related scenes that create the vague impression of a story. And this isn't a thing I can even begin to work on. Every time I try to plot, I am simply flailing wildly. Usually without even realizing I am flailing. I have always known I'm a relatively bad plotter, but recent introspection has revealed to me how extremely bad I am at it.

What I need is advice, guidance, resources to plunder for valuable nuggets of helpful information. I don't know how to plot, and I don't know how to learn how to plot. How do I learn how to plot? I need to be pointed in the right direction here.

That's the advantage of having writing friends. I can ask for help, and they'll be able to understand the question. I'm going to sleep on this for now, and when I wake up, if I still feel like all I can do is flail, I'm going to bug some of my friends for advice.

Goodnight y'all.

Apparently flash fiction sells online

A friend linked me to a post today about flash fiction markets:

http://lizzshepherd.suite101.com/flash-fiction-markets-online-a278787

This interests me. Sure, it's not much money. And the information is a bit out of date, so some of the sites have changed. But it's a way to get my writing out there, and make a little extra cash to get me through some financially tough times.

My primary concern is that I don't generally write flash fiction. I tend towards longer fiction, usually of novel length. I'm a writer of door-stoppers, or at least a planner of door-stoppers. Writing shorter fiction is going to be a challenge for me. But, I think, an interesting challenge. And if I can make an extra twenty or fifty dollars a month off of it, well then that's great.

I'm definitely going to give it a shot. I haven't got much to lose.

Bad ideas everywhere!

I haven't quite fulfilled my goal to write a scene every day, and by that I mean I've utterly failed and not written a thing since my last post.

Getting serious isn't really working out, is it?

Fortunately for me, I have an actual reason this time, instead of mere laziness or lack of motivation. I haven't had a good idea. And I don't mean the usual artistic wangst about how my art sucks and I'm no good (which I do a fair bit of). No, my current story idea is actively bad.

Epic grimdark military space opera science fantasy adventure.

It needs all of those adjectives and nouns. All of them.

And it's terrible. The entire thing is just an excuse to daydream about gigantic space battles between massive fleets. And armed planets. And eldritch abominations.

It sounds awesome, until you realize that the action is the ONLY thing I'm interested in. This sort of thing is more suited to a movie, or a video game, than to a novel. Or rather, serious of novels. Because this would end up running over a million words. Of plotless space battling action.

I can't write that. I respect myself too much to write that story. If it had a good plot, and some solid characters... yes. I'd love to write a story with epic space battles in it because those are cool. But this idea isn't a story with epic space battles. This is just epic space battles, no story.

So, until this idea gets out of my head, I probably won't be writing much of anything. Hopefully it won't last beyond the next week. Hopefully.

Time to get serious

I like writing. Really, I do. You might not think so, because I do it so very rarely, but it gives me joy to look at a story and say to myself, "I wrote that. I made it happen. I'm awesome."

Which brings me back to me writing so very rarely. This is not how I want things. I want to have more stories that I can look at and say, "I wrote that." And I think I've narrowed down why that doesn't happen.

I get bored. Writing is so slow! Scenes fly through my head at an amazing rate. The action, emotions, character motivations, and circumstances surrounding a scene all fly through my head so quickly that the scene plays out faster than a movie. My fingers can't keep up with it. I'd try dictation software, but often my mouth can't even keep up. And so I don't write.

But the stories still happen. In my head, all the time. While I'm listening to music, in the shower, even while watching TV. Any time I get bored, and my mind has time to wander, a story will start bouncing around inside my skull and they all want out! I've got novels worth of story stacked up in my mind just waiting to be unleashed. They've been mentally written, revised, edited, retconned, revised again, and re-written. Twice. If I had been physically writing all that, they would be ready to submit to publishers.

I have one character who has gone through a dozen development stages, just because his is a story I like to daydream about when my mind wanders. He's had nearly a hundred fantastic adventures in my mind and not a single word has been written about him!

Clearly, I need to get serious about writing. Yesterday I did an experiment. I sat down and I wrote a scene. Just one scene, and a short one at that. Only 1,024 words, which the computer scientist in me appreciated. And I discovered that I was enjoying myself while writing.

In the past I have always started out to write a novel. A whole story. Before me stood a colossal mountain of words waiting to be written, and they would weigh on my while I wrote. Each word I put on the page would be a drop in the bucket, barely making an impact on the whole of the unwritten wordcount.

But yesterday I found that things don't have to work that way. When I take a section of the story, a single scene, a small discrete chunk... I can have fun while writing it out! I don't have to be bored by the process of writing! Weee!

So that's my goal, for now. Every day, take some time out. An hour or two. Doesn't have to be all at once. Just sit down and by the end of the day have a nice scene written out. A few thousand words at most, not even a chapter.

Before I know it, I'll have a story written out on actual pages.