Writing

I'm not even insomniac right now.  A symptom of summer vacation.

So anyway, there's this.

For those too lazy to click on the link, it's a gay writing contest.  I could be published.  Seriously.

And so, in a major counting chickens way, I am going to go pretentious writer on you and talk about my writing process.

It starts, naturally, with ideas.  I looked at the contest guidelines, and all it gave me was a fictional (check) unpublished (check) short story about "being queer."  That should be easy, I thought.  Everything I touch turns to gay.  Honestly.  Even dragons (though really it's more like they're third-gendered...hey, they're my dragons, I can give them whatever biology I want!).

Then I dug up the short pieces I currently have in the works (a very generous way of saying a couple paragraphs saved in a word document), and realized that they somehow all featured heterosexual relationships.  No cheating on this one; I would have to start from scratch.

It was obvious to me that there would have to be some sort of fantastical or supernatural element to the story.  Because it's me.  So in a sense this story would be a double subversion, both of a typical fantasy story and of the typical gay story.  No gay angst or bully-story (I hate bully stories, with utmost apologies to anyone who has ever been bullied).  And absolutely NO.  LESBIAN.  PARENTS.  I will save my rants on the gay-lit genre for other posts; suffice to say that, as my last post hints at, a major part of my inspiration for writing comes from being annoyed at how stories are all written this way, when I would much rather someone tried writing it that way.

Essentially, that is how I decided on a recently-outed lesbian high-schooler with a vampire brother.

Sometimes, writing it easy.  The story is just there, burning like an overly poetic flame, and you have to dash to capture it all on paper before it burns out.  Yes, I really do mean paper.  I feel like I think better with paper.  This feeling rarely lasts for more than a week, which is one of the reasons I have trouble with longer works.

The first draft is insane.  You just write.  It doesn't matter if it makes sense; what matters is that it is right.  Censorship is not your friend.

Then, after a rest to ease my cramped wrist, I type it up as the second draft.  My first draft of the vamp story was 30 pages written, a bit over the 5k word limit, so some things had to be cut.  Some scenes had to be cut anyway, because they had nothing to do with the plot; or, at the very least, incorporated into other scenes that were relevant. 

After that comes what is more of a draft number 2.5 than a third draft.  Read through what you typed, fix typing errors, delete pointless sentences, clean up the prose a bit.  Make it presentable.  Because that's the next step.  Presenting it. 

You can look at my old posts to see how bad this is for me.  It really is just pure cowardice on my part, though.

You see, if no one ever sees anything I have written, I can congratulate myself on being an unrecognized genius, and indulge in all sorts of fantasies of what being a famous genius author would be like.  I disgust myself, sometimes, I really do.

If, on the other hand, I do show it to some select, trusted, friends, and they tell me "Yeah, it's good, but you need to elaborate on that plot point and add some description, I only know what one character looks like, and where are they anyway?" and I take their good suggestions and finish up the story, and send it off to the publisher...I get fifty bucks and a published work.  I gain a foothold in the publishing world, so that all this writing I do might mean something someday (stories don't mean anything if you got no one to tell them to, and all that).  At the very least, I get my first rejection note and attain my first milestone on the way to being a published author.  That seems the more likely scenario, because you just know that some 14-year-old girl is going to submit a poem about wanting to kill herself, which trumps vampire junkies by a college student.  With apologies to anyone who has ever written poetry about wanting to kill themself. 

The point of the last paragraph was to say that a real rejection letter is better than dreams of grandeur.  Right?

Then again, I suppose the point of having dreams is to follow them, and no one ever said that would be easy.