Now that I’m refocused on Golems and Kings, I would like to finish it not later than the end of the summer, so that I can restart Rogue Planet in September.
Nonlinear Storytelling
Balancing a timeline across multiple viewpoints and storylines, and deciding how the viewpoints will be sequenced and presented is all the nonlinearity most stories will necessitate or support. But there are stories where it is appropriate to do something more creative and imaginative.
Lengths and Forms
Working within those forms is part of managing reader expectations, which is a key component of making a story appeal to a given reader, but the expectations we have around form and length of stories are not derived from some optimization method synchronized with humanity’s ability to interact with literature.
Clarity of Vision – Opacity of Writing
In a substantial way, the very clarity of my vision for the story undermined my ability to write that story so someone else could understand it.
Writing in the “Real” World
Writing a story associated with the real world is complicated, and it becomes more complicated the more closely associated with the present real world it is.
An Oblique Approach to Reality
Thinking of poetry as an oblique approach to reality reframes my understanding of poems and helps explain why I’ve always struggled with writing original poems, but it doesn’t mean I can suddenly write poetry.
Specificity
Being specific with what you say might seem important in legal writing, essays, philosophy, and other, less fictional formats, but storytelling is less obvious. If you’ve been paying attention to our posts about word choice, though, you can probably see its relevance.
Judging Your Own Work
I write stories so other people can read them, but I’m the one who must be comfortable having written them.
Intentionality in Storytelling
With only a handful of lines, and a few words in each line, each one of them must bear a larger load for the poem. Everything must be intentional.
Using Stock Phrases
The language we use has meaning and depths we don’t always consciously recognize, and stock phrases often convey meanings and suggestions which we don’t fully recognize and which we probably don’t intend when we deploy them in our writing.
IGC Publishing 