It’s now June and the Write A Day in May challenge is over. Now that it’s June what do I do? I stop writing. The reason for the stoppage is because over Memorial weekend my wife got me hooked on Diablo 2, again, and every night we’ve been using the little time we have without kids working through the game; which is for another post.
Though the habit didn’t stick, something remarkable did happen, I wrote. I wrote more fiction in May than I’ve ever written at an given time prior. In all of that writing I leaned some things about writing that will help in the coming months and as I continue to write. And since I’m a techy/geeky kind of guy, I’ve included stats of this challenge below as well.
Lessons:
I learned that I really like to free write. I always thought I was more of an outliner but the story didn’t come till I just start writing. With fiction only lasting a few hundred words I didn’t really need much of a direction, but with bigger pieces like a novel, I think I’ll setup key points that I want to happen and then just start free writing till I get to them.
I’m not a “5 minute writer”. If I only had 5 minutes to write I wouldn’t write and just miss that day. I needed at least a good hour before I would even consider writing. From this I now know that I need to schedule blocks of time for writing instead of just fitting it in.
I learned that every story I posted to my blog will be very hard to sell. (Honestly I don’t think I would sell any of the as they stand anyway.) I didn’t realize that posting stories online 1. makes the piece harder to publish traditionally (because once online someone can get it without paying?) and 2. doing so uses up the first time digital printing rights to the story, leaving just reprint rights for digital copies going forward. So what does that mean for this blog? All the stories I post wont be full stories, just scenes from stories, or stories that I don’t much care to publish anyway. So no worries there.
For someone who wants to be a Sci-Fi and Fantasy writer I sure wrote a lot of general fiction. Every time I wanted to write a Sci-Fi piece I got bogged down in the science and wanting to get it right or feeling I couldn’t make a compelling story in a short story. Fantasy was much the same. What came easy was contemporary fiction that had nothing out of the ordinary or fantastical in it. I believe this is a manifestation of not having a lot of time to do any speculative fiction justice (point 2) and not planning anything before writing (point 1).
Lastly, this isn’t really a new lesson, but I’m reminded about my most glaring flaws in writing, poor grammar and switching between present and past tense all the time. I tried to pay attention as much as I could to such errors, but quite a few made it online and I haven’t gone back to revise them; and probably wont, at least not without rewriting and fleshing out the story.
Stats:
Stories: Anticipated — 22, Actual — 18
Twitter Fiction: 5
Total Word Count: 13,851
Average Word Count: 767
Average Word Count (minus Twitter Fiction): 1,054
Shortest Story Length (in words): 22
Longest Story Length (in words): 3,478
Story Genres: Fantasy (1), General Fiction (6), Sci-Fi (2), Paranormal (3), Exercises* (2), Fairy Tale (1), Suspense (1), Humor (2)
Favorites: Moral Battle, Beware the Dragon, and Holy Communication
*Writing that doesn’t fit in a genre. I was practicing writing descriptively an object/person, not a real story.
