On The Importance Of Doing Research...

I've just posted the first of fifty two stories, the blog can be considered truly live now. This fills me with a sense of profound terror of course, but also freedom. Whatever happens now is completely out of my hands, I can read all the articles I like about publicizing my blog and manage to convince lots of people to visit, but I can't make them download or, more importantly, enjoy the stories I write. I know that I won't please everyone, with everything I do, I'm neither that naive or arrogant. The hope is more that I'll please someone, with something and at the end of it all be a better and more consistent story teller. Bearing that in mind perhaps it's time to summarize what I feel I've learned from "Cabinet pussy-cat" that I can apply to writing my second story.

I think the most important things I've learned are what I'll call the two R's... research and rewrites. When I completed the first draft of my story two years ago, I was really very pleased with it. On dredging out the file of old stuff that's never seen the light of day, I realized that my confidence was somewhat misplaced. There were huge gaps in the internal logic of the story, screwy time lines and an ending that, while satisfying to write was full of factual errors. It was the work of ten minutes to correct the factual errors with just a few searches for scholarly documents on google. This small act of research on my part saved my ending from being the exact opposite of what happens under those circumstances. It may seem like a minor save, but to anyone with any working knowledge or personal experience of the thing in question it would almost surely destroy any previous enjoyment built up before the denouement.

The second R, rewrites is a slightly more thorny issue for any aspiring writer, including myself. When you have an idea, it's a white hot presence burning away at both your conscious and subconscious mind and it dominates your every thought, whether sleeping or awake. This is a wonderful feeling, but like any white hot burny thing it runs out of energy quickly. It melts through your brain like thermite and if you don't catch it and direct that energy quickly it will burn down into whichever primordial recess of the mind stories come from and may never surface again. So you have just one option, switching metaphors for a moment, you load your weapons, make ready with your battle cry and launch yourself over the top into No Man's Land. To carry my second metaphor to it's conclusion, mad charges into No Man's Land don't generally end well. They're messy, gruesome and undignified. For the most part, so is what you've just written.

It's important to realize that this is o.k., that the act of capturing your idea while it's still white hot is all that matters in a first draft. When you re-read what you've just written it might well appear to be steaming pile of rancid dreck, whether this is a fair objective assessment or a simple lack of self confidence is irrelevant. What matters is that you can see the flaws, after all this is a piece of writing by an author who bears a startling resemblance to you in terms of choices of subject matter and style, but is slightly worse at writing than you are at this exact moment. If this were not the case, how else are you able to spot the flaws that the writer missed? It is your job, your duty in fact, to polish this misguided fool's attempts at translating a good idea into a good story until it shines as brightly as your skills can allow. If you truly believe your work is ready for public consumption the very second you finish it, you are either a genius or in desperate need of a reliable and honest first reader.

Having taken all of the above on board, I think the important things to bear in mind for next week are, always fact check and finish the story ahead of the deadline (next Wednesday) for good or ill. Hopefully the worst elements of bad writing and poor construction can be caught in the re-write.