Ideas, Writing and Drabbles
Dev Blog #5
This past week I have been getting flooded with ideas. I have had not 1, but 4 solid ideas. This was a golden week. Beyond the idea I talked about at the beginning of October in my dev blog, which I motioned I had been kicking around for some time before that post, I have had little to no new ideas. Really, I have either not had as much time to write the last few months, or been head down with queries, my novel or existing stories. So it tracks that suddenly I have a flood of new ideas.
Speaking of my novel, still no headway, but I have been writing mostly rough drafts for my stories. The fun thing is that they are all winter themed! This honestly makes me so excited. The past two years, whenever I’ve attempted to write something winter themed, it was like pulling teeth. Every single one of those things ended up in my locked archive of maybe never.
A quick comment on writing when you don’t want to, I think sometimes you have to. You don’t always want to make art, and your muses will not always show up. Look at me 1 new idea over about 4 months, then 4 in one week. When you find the muse, lock it up and drain it for all its worth. But in the meantime, want to write even when it’s painful or you're not in the mood. Yeah, sometimes you should just call it, but writing rituals and habits will help. There is also value found in using your writing time in doing something writing adjacent such as research, reviewing other people stuff, etc. Again all of this does factor on your life, who you are, what writing means to you, and what your writing “success” is for you.
Alright back on track, so instead of writing on all these pieces, I am going to dive into my new Drabble idea. This actually started when I was querying pieces and I saw an open submission call for a “Winter setting, horror Drabble about ‘renewal’” by Apex magazine.
So I have written my fair share of Drabbles and I throw my standard process for these 100 word troubles right out the window. Normally for Drabbles I have a cheat sheet I fill out (focused mostly on my “why”), then just write. In these rough drafts, I am not super focused on my word count or wording, but on capturing the idea. For instance, my Drabble for the Apex contest, called “Emergence” was 142wc in its rough draft. From there, I started going through a series of a couple of blind and side-by-side rewrites. I do this to hone in on the direction I want to go. For Drabbles I find while you can be more abstract, it still needs to be a story, otherwise you might as well shift to free form poetry.
Once you are done with those couple of rewrites, then I shift to making sub drafts, where I cut, add and change wording. Once I have changed about ~5 words I go to the next sub draft (i.e. 1.1), once I feel I have changed a fair amount, which is typically every three sub drafts, I stamp that I have gone into the next draft (i.e. 2.0). With pieces this small and the rapid iterations, it’s relatively easy to stay on top of grammar and formatting as I go.
If you look at my recently published Drabble, “The Call”, you will see I experiment with formatting. In the dialogue you see this reflected, it requires you as the reader to put all the formatting together to create a full picture by the end of the story. I think formatting is an art form that is sorely under used in main stream written word, other than poetry. If you have any suggestions, other than ‘House of Leaves’ message me.
Over all here are some numbers of what this iteration for me looks like with “Emergence”:
Total Drafts: 27 drafts
Major Drafts: 7 drafts
*Total Word Net Changes between drafts: 101 words
(This is not accounting for words that might be different, but just the word count number change between drafts. Ie going from 102 to 104 equals a 2 word difference that was used to generate this total value.)
While I do rapid iterations, I also give Drabbles space over several sittings to ensure that I have those fresh eyes and am ensuring I am not missing something simple to solve a problem. Drabbles as a whole has been a fun and interesting forum that I highly suggest every writer tries it for a challenge, the learning experience and skill set it hones (i.e. Word choice, ect). I have heard in writing that sometimes the brightest ideas come from the most restrictive of rules.
Also this will be my last Dev Blog until the end of the year, see you after the birth of a new year.