Confessions of a Premise Writer

by Rob Hines

That’s me. I’m a Premise Writer.

It sounds like a real job, doesn't it? Premise Writer. It almost sounds like you could make money doing that.

Nope. Not even remotely.

Trust me. Being broke does NOT look this good.

Premise writing is what I've been doing since I decided to start writing fiction, and I've only recently come to grips with this label. It’s a sickness, kind of like rabies, I think. You can cure it, but it takes some gnarly treatment and you should probably avoid people for a month or so.

Are you a premise writer? Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you have a billion ideas written in piles of spiral notebooks and/or an incredibly cluttered note-taking app on your phone?
2. Have you written any more than about a page or two of any one idea?
3. Do you waste time at work organizing your ideas in fun Google Drive folders instead of actually turning them into thought-out stories?
4. When you do write a story, do you tend to jump right to the “million dollar idea” and linger there for a while before jumping right to the end?
5. Have you had a story about a problem gambler who acquires a golden touch rejected because an editor feels “it all comes too easily” meaning the premise happens with no real conflict or consequences?

Okay, that last one is pretty much exclusive to me, but if you feel any sympathy pains for the other four, you may be a Premise Writer too. Hope is not lost, though. You and I can break from a fate of being buried in an avalanche of hoarded notebooks full of neglected concepts. The key is (cue dramatic music) OUTLINING!

Yep, there they go. The artists are leaving now. The ones who want their writing to be an expression of their inner beings have given up on me.

Okay, the rest of you? You’re professional writers. You’re the ones who know you have to plan a project to achieve consistent results (read: get paid to write)

I’m not dissing anyone who doesn't plan their writing. Hell, until about a week or two ago, I WAS one of those people. At least, I was that way in my fiction writing. My revelation came when I realized that I’m more than just a fiction writer. I’m a corporate writer too. I write copy for advertising, corporate blog articles, web copy, and even a corporate comic book! And you wanna hear a secret? I plan each of those projects before I write them. Why? Because I like to eat horrible food and my paycheck allows me to continue buying said horrible food. If I'm that committed to horrible food, why shouldn't I be just as committed to fulfilling my writing dream?

My cubicle-mate at the above-referenced day job is also a writer and he has published two non-fiction books (if you’re a baseball fan, you can buy one of them here). He’s a relentless planner when he writes and I guess I thought there were different rules for non-fiction. There aren't. Well, except for the whole factual thing.

No matter what you write, the best way to make writing more efficient and less torturous is to effectively outline your plot and your characters. I’m not talking about the high school research paper method with Roman numerals and A’s and B’s and all that. All I’m suggesting is you know what’s going to happen from start to finish as well as the major events in between. It may be a bulleted list. It may be a detailed list of acts and scenes. It may even be a mind map that starts with a central theme and bursts in all different directions. The key is putting your whole story on the page before you try to write 100,000 words around it.

I’m not saying it’s for everyone. I know many great writers just sit and write. Good for them. I’m a Premise Writer. If I do that, I will do a fantastic job of writing down a plot with terribly boring characters and little to no exposition or resolution. In other words, I will suck.

So now I’m outlining. I’m giving myself a chance to hear the story from start to finish and understand my characters so I have a blueprint to guide my actual writing. I’m giving myself a chance to not suck.

Words to live (and write) by

Well, at least not suck as much.

Tweet

Are You Ready or Not? New Beginnings

By Molly Field

As a writer, nothing brings you greater satisfaction than penning that crisp sentence, flowing with the prose you not only create yourself, but with excellent writing offered by other authors.

Because we fancy ourselves a complex species, the opposite side of the same coin proposes that as a writer, nothing brings you greater senses of defeat and challenge than the words of other authors.

Spring is coming. The cherry blossoms on our neighborhood trees are pinking and peeking; the cardinals and robins are chatty, looking for wives. The sun is shining a little stronger and a little brighter every day. Spring, brings Macy's white sales and thoughts of purging, spring cleaning, new beginnings. I believe that many "New Year's Resolutions" should really be made on the first day of spring because in the winter, it's still too cold (at least where I live) to begin training for a marathon outside. (Yes, I am aware that not all NYRs focus on fitness.)

So for this month, we are encouraged to talk to you about new beginnings, fresh starts... This is a challenge for me because I am in the throes of a mental reorganization myself. But no time like the present, eh?

I didn't know what I was going to write about today. I get my prompt from our fearless leader, and sometimes I gnaw on a bone and other times I just bang one out. This time, I did a little of both. 

Without boring you to tears, I gave up Facebook for Lent. I'm not terrifically Catholic, but the opportunity was so well-timed and I wanted an out anyway, that I couldn't resist. It had all become too much for me.

My intention was to spend that time working on my book's drafts and edit it, which I have done, but not with the attention I paid to my Facebook "career." So clearly, I've got some work to do. The thing is though, that yesterday, my cousin sent me the cover art for her friend's new book, Flat Water Tuesday, a story about competitive rowing and young love. As an adult rower who hails from a renown rowing town, whose extended family rowed, whose parents met because of rowing, and whose brothers and cousins and now son row, the book has a no-brainer appeal for me.

It is not ironic (rather I consider it cosmically inspired) that when that cover art came to me, I was also on the phone being wooed by an exiting board member of my novice son's rowing club to be... yeah: president. I have attended one general membership meeting. They do have their ducks in a row over there, but my "pedigree" was undeniable and most of the board members are land lubbers. I said yes. (D'OH!) We'll see how it goes. It could be great. New beginnings, right?

The energy of these new starts, beginnings, etc., theme is intoxicating; it reminds me of when That Boy looked at me for the first time. The theme for today's post is coursing through me like whisky. I am simultaneously totally psyched and utterly petrified. 

It was one year ago this week, that I sat on my cousin's micro deck beneath the unseasonably warm sun in Buffalo where we talked about her friend's book. He'd just signed on with an agent; a publisher was totally interested. The energy was ramping up. They were talking contracts, money, real business. A part of me died inside when I heard all this. I thought, "I'll never be there... this guy's amazing..." and yet a part of me never died, because that summer I wrote my book. The one that needs the editing and the love I need to give it. I can't blame Facebook; I blame me.

I'm stuck now, just a little, but stuck enough to say this about new beginnings: I am considering writing my foreword now. However, I have this sense that I'm going to end up writing a whole new book, in fact the feeling that I will end up writing a whole new version of that book is undeniable. Is that so bad?

I am an Adult Child of Alcoholics, plural. We ACOAs don't have much luck or experience finishing things, but I know this: if I get started on something that I love, I never give it up. I push and push and push. And while I know that writing that first version of my book was cathartic and amazing, the next revised version, the one that spawns through this foreword, is going to be even better, even clearer. I just need six uninterrupted weeks. Why did I say yes to the rowing club?

But I have to be careful. As an ACOA I am constantly doubting myself, my intuition, my gut. I question the enthusiasm I have for something, I wonder if what I'm doing is enough or valuable. I get so caught up in the questioning of the act that I seldom act. It seems the only thing that fuels my fire to get up and keep going is a silent rage that is borne of the frustration that constant second guessing yields.

People who don't know the world of an ACOA look at us when we talk about it as if we have three heads. "What do you mean you hid under your bed for hours listening for your angry parent to close their door for the night?" or "What do you mean you cooked your own food when you were five? Who does that?" or the other ACOAs in your life will nod knowingly. Either way, you end up talking about that stuff for hours until you can't anymore; you're either sharing stories with people who also survived it, or your busy trying to convince people that those memories were real. It can be taxing.

I'm writing about all this here, so candidly, because I can. It's my literary place under the bed. I'm 45 years old and I'm still worried that my parents will be mad at me if I write about my life. The spiteful kid inside me, my Peter Pan, says this, "Do you think for one minute they considered your anger feelings?" and I think for a moment, sigh, look into the distance and tell Peter, "I have no clue."

Just to be clear, I didn't grow up in tatters under a shanty on a mountainside; we had no want for anything material. My parents were well-educated, connected and intelligent people. I was constantly reminded of my potential, that I could be a concert violinist if I wanted, but I didn't want that. Because they are also ACOAs, my parents knew the damage that negative talk can do. However, it can sound cliché, but it was what they didn't say that spoke louder than anything they did say.

Right now, I can feel the energy ebb a smidge, but the passion is still there; the nagging thought that this foreword can be the jack to "unstuck" me must be attended to. It must be honored.

New beginnings are here for all of us. You don't have to be an ACOA to have them. You just have to be willing to leave the past in the past and if you can summon any ounce of courage from those crushing days that kept you going to today, use it to move you to tomorrow and get that book published.

We are writers. Let's do this.

come out come out, wherever you are. photo credit: me

   

TweetTweet

The Hopelessly Romantic Writer (Emphasis on the "Hopeless" Part): A Micro Rant On Love, Loss, and Getting Through February Without Having a Complete Mental Breakdown

by Jody Aberdeen

All aboard the Bitter Train, with whistle-stops at Singlesville, Lonesome Prairie, and, you guessed it, the Heartbreak Hotel. Get your tickets out and hold on tight: this ride's gonna suck and we don't serve peanuts. (Wait, they do serve peanuts on trains, right? No? Well, they do now.)

I've never been a fan of February even before it became the unofficial "Love Month" after about a decade of chocolate hearts and exchanging Valentine's cards at school ("You Choo-Choo Choose Me", in keeping with the train theme). Even when I was in my relationship, the lead up to February 14th and even the rest of the month was just one giant bubble of peer pressure to out-romance the other couples in our networks.

Then, when I became single, and those couples disowned me (as couples tend to do when le divorce strikes their comrades), the new challenge became fending off the artificial pressure to find someone so I could have this perfect "Valentine's" moment, along with balancing my own feelings of loneliness.

Well, fie to all of that. Fie, I say!

Now, these aren't uncommon complaints, but as it happens, I am a writer and a creative person, and at the risk of sounding like a stereotype, my skin is thinner than most people, despite my best efforts at swagger and confidence when I'm out at parties or at my day job in retail.

And so having a holiday about love, sex, and romance that's grown, amoeba-like, from the 14th of the month into the month itself, I think I could be forgiven if it opens up a few things that I normally keep locked up under my bed the rest of the year.

Write For Catharsis

My first book, Convergence, is a science fiction romance, consisting of about 1/3 an old idea about soulmates and alternate dimensions, but 2/3 catharsis as I worked some psychological damage control after my marriage ended three years ago. As such, I have a track record of successfully processing out heavy emotions involving love and loss into a great piece of writing.

To that end, I've started an erotic sci-fi/horror story, hopefully finished by the end of next week, that will hopefully capture these feelings, honour them, and then put them somewhere safe and half-way productive, kind of like a carbon sequestration for the soul.

If the bad feels lead into a great story and get me a writing credit to boot, then it's almost worth it. Almost....

Sex Transmutation, Winter, and the Kobayashi Maru of Positive Thinking

Thing is, I'm not completely satisfied with writing catharsis, because around this time of year, the feelings run on this spin cycle, like a Superstorm Sandy of confluences between the winter weather outside (I read somewhere that NASA astronauts on long duration missions would experience similar emotions to SAD because of the lack of the colour green in their experience) and all of these feelings that Love Month drums up for me. Everything just swirls around until the spring, and the sky may be bright and blue one day, but get cloudy and sleeting the next.

Writing is indeed my One Thing that I'm going to be doing the rest of my life, regardless of pay and benefits, but when it becomes almost exclusively a tool for emotional stability rather than a creative outlet, it stops being fun, and then I just don't feel like doing it. That short story will probably miss its deadline unless I have some kind of turnaround on the inside.

But I'm also tired of my personal development practices that tell me to be positive all the time just like that: to me, that's a dishonouring of my authenticity. Sure, I'll get back there, but I have to process first.

Yet still, I have to be careful not to start re-ingesting the crap I've been venting out (sorry for the image, but it's the only way to describe it accurately), which then just feeds the cycle.

The whole thing is a little like the Kobayashi Maru (watch Star Trek II or even the J.J. Abrams movie if you don't get the reference). Nothing really to do but keep going. That's the key: persistence.

Interestingly, our fearless leader Carrie Bailey recently mentioned Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. There's a chapter on "Persistence" that I read over and over again when I'm on my upswing. Check it out if you haven't, as well as the chapter called "The Mystery of Sex Transmutation", which I recently blogged about on my site and which is in keeping with Love Month.

Life vs Fiction

(Audible sigh). I guess I don't know how to end this mini rant. At one of my writer's guild meetings before Christmas, we had a deep conversation about if many writers become torn between creating interesting characters and becoming them. Hemingway is the chief archetype of this idea, but you look at the lives of most writers in the English language, and you see this Bohemian blend, contrasting stripes of tragedy, emotional instability, privilege and poverty, and almost always a touch of otherwordly inspiration: all traits that themselves are worthy of novels.

Yesterday, I saw The Words starring Dennis Quaid and Bradley Cooper, one of the finest and accurate (and devastating) movies made in recent years about the reality of becoming a career author. Near the end, someone says the following line: 'You have to choose between life and fiction. The two are very close, but almost never touch."

More than most, Love Month makes me highly self conscious, which hurts my ability to write about anything else other than my own life, one that isn't nearly as interesting or as relevant as Hemingway's, I'll admit (though it would make a fantastic comedy of errors, I'll admit, perhaps starring George Lopez as my older, wiser self).

As always, though, I have my vocation to get me through the winter, at times like these I can't help but think about the improvements I need to make in my life, especially in the romance department: putting myself out there again, taking down that ten foot wall around my heart or at least expediting the search for the girl with an eleven foot ladder cleverly concealed in her deceptively small purse. Or, possibly just dropping the pursuit altogether and seeing what else I can do to fulfil myself.

I'll be fine come the spring, honestly, but for now, I do what I was born to do, and write my present truth in fiction.

(This is the part where I'm supposed to refer back to the train metaphor I started with, but I'll leave my fellow Peevish citizens to do that...what do you guys think?  Try to make it end on a high note: this is admittedly a downer post).


Tweet