Ahoy Mythopoeians!
This past week’s writing has been particularly challenging. I’m actually digging into that one hour morning writing time I set aside and previously wrote about to make this post - does it count? I mean, it shouldn’t. I said that time would only be for creative works only, and as cathartic as this newsletter is, it’s a different type of writing. But - it must be done. Lest I not have the time to post at all, like this past weekend where I decided to go to a concert Friday evening, and subsequently could not muster up the energy to get up Saturday morning and write (I was a little hungover).
Habits. Hard to form, easy to break.
But you know what’s not easy to break? Fiction. Story. Some of the hardest substance in the world. It just doesn’t want to be work sometimes. Such as it has been the last few weeks working on Glow #9. A tough sled where I try to bring in the external plot back together in one physical space, all the while justifying the internal motivations of the characters and where they are emotionally.
Glow is my first ongoing series and thus far the hardest thing I’ve found is how to get the story moving as one long continuous narrative. I think, for my money, writing a contained narrative is easier with a set beginning, middle, and end. For Glow, we have a very rough idea of an ending, but everything else is and has been subject to change. But yeah, not going to lie - it’s been tough. We’re very much “mid-season” which is always a tough place to be.
The Freewrite
One of the tools I try to employ when I’m stuck is the freewrite. This is where, instead of writing in the format of the fiction, I take a step back and blabber on about where the story is, where I am with that story, and anything in between that might pop up as I’m thinking/ writing/flowing. This is what it’s looks like:
Words, words words! What I try to tell myself when I get stuck like this is that it’s all a process, and if I’m not sure where / how things should go, it probably just means I need to think about it more, both actively while working on the story, and passively using the power of my subconscious.
The free write is one way to activate that subconscious power.
Story Breakdowns
Another tool I like to use is active analysis. This is where I’ll watch another narrative with intent, breaking down all of the structural details in a formal way that allows me to map how each thread is weaves.
Here’s one I did from Avatar: The Last Airbender Episode 1x13 “The Blue Spirit”
In the PREMISE section, I break down each storyline as best as I see it into one sentence. I color code the storylines which allows me to more clearly visualize how they interact with one another once I start summarizing the story beat for beat.
In the STAKES section, I try to get to the heart of the conflict of the story. Conflict is meaning in stories, and the ones that work the best have both external and internal conflicts that, when contrasted with one another, reveal a clash of values that are the PHILOSOPHICAL. This type of breakdown is largely taken by Michael Arndt’s excellent lecture series on screenwriting.
The rest of the breakdown is a pretty straightforward beat by beat recounting of what happens in the story, color coding things by storyline and broken down into individual Acts.
After I break down the story, I’ll usually start jotting notes in freewrite style at the bottom, noting things / techniques I saw and little “inside baseball” moments related to the craft of writing:
So… is it working? Well, I’m still ground to a halt and haven’t broken the story of Glow #9 quite yet. But it’s getting there! And I have faith that as long as I keep working on the story, keep thinking about it, keep writing, it’ll happen.
Ray