So for today’s post, I thought I might share with you what I’ve been thinking regarding the whole ‘writing’ bit.
I’ve decided that I’m hopeless at writing endings. Even climaxes prior to endings.
My reasoning for this: I start a story, get somewhere around the middle-ish bit, and then stop. And then I think, “Hey, I can do this, let’s try again” and so I start another story, get somewhere around the middle-ish bit, and then stop. And then I think, “Oh no! It happened again! But I can do this, I know I can!” So again, I start another story, get somewhere around – you guessed it! – the middle-ish bit, and then – you guessed it again! – I stop.
Now it occurred to me fairly recently that no matter how many times I repeat this process, I am not actually achieving what I’m setting out to achieve, which is the whole ‘improving my writing of endings’ bit. I’m not even improving the ‘improving my writing of the climaxes prior to the endings’ bit.
Solution? Write shorter stories. Get to the endings quicker. That’s solution number 1.
Solution number 2? Write the ending first. And being the intensely crazy person that I am, ‘write the ending first’ means ‘write the final sentence’ first. And then the second final sentence. And then the sentence prior to that, then the next one, and the next, and so on.
Now, I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before. Maybe it’s an old, established technique, maybe I’ve just made up a new one, I don’t know. But I tried it, and it seemed to work for me! The finished story, Adam, is currently sitting on the ‘Short Stories’ page that you can see on the top bar of this website, next to ‘Home”. But don’t bother – the linking part of the site doesn’t work yet, so if you try clicking on that page you’ll just get that extremely annoying error message. But it’s there, ‘published’, and waiting for the site to work properly so you can read it if you’d like.
So anyway, that’s how I wrote Adam. It’s 1431 words, which is about 8000 fewer words than I normally am up to when I get to that ‘middle-ish’ bit that I was talking about, earlier. And it’s finished! And I’m kinda happy with it. Well, that it got finished. Admittedly, I didn’t use the ‘go back one sentence’ technique the *whole* way through – after a paragraph or so, I went to the beginning and ‘chunked’ out what I wanted to happen, and then I worked out exactly how FEW words I had for each chunk, and then wrote from there, filling in the bits in between the chunks last. And it got finished! Which was, for me, quite a major achievement.
So yes, it’s over on that new page. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, when you’re able to actually read it, dear reader! (And my own personal feedback on the story? Find more synonyms for the verb ‘shudder’!)