BRW: Behind the Blind 3

I’ve written many of my short stories this year based on prompts. I’m beginning to like it that way. It’s as if I’m building upon a structure, however fragile.

In high school I had a painting class. The instructor encouraged us to start by filling the canvas with random color—not painting a shape or a figure or anything recognizable. The idea was to not be intimidated by the empty white space and have something to work with instead, even if it’s only random colors. 

The same principle may apply to writing with prompts. By starting with a word or phrase and letting a story grow from it, for me at least, it’s better than creating something from nothing, so to speak.

Making the prompts fit into a story is another matter.

NaNoWriMo

I didn’t attend National Novel Writing Month last month, but I took part once before, in 2013. The draft I wrote that year led to my one (so far) novel.

It took almost a decade to write, after revisions.

Once I finished, I wanted to publish it, but the more I looked it over, the more I realized the process of learning how to write modern fiction well was more important to me than having a book I could brag about to my friends. I like the finished product. I think it could find a home in the marketplace somewhere, given the right publisher—but I still have a lot to learn. Plus the marketplace is kinda scary.

I’d rather have a “practice novel”  and a body of short material than a book I rushed into publication because I was so eager to see my book in stores, only to watch it sink like a stone in the sales charts. I was eager to have a book after revising my NaNo draft, but I’m relieved I didn’t publish it. Not yet.

I did partake in something similar to NaNo. Jami Attenberg holds an annual write-along in which everyone writes a thousand words a day for two weeks. The version I attended was for only six days.

Like NaNo, there was a set goal of words to write in a finite time period. I chose not to work on a story or essay; I typed whatever came to mind on a given day, without too much thought. Some of what I wrote was light. Other stuff was more personal and emotional. Still others was just repeating phrases over and over. 

Some writing gurus advise writing this way as a warmup exercise. I had tried it before, but this was the first time I did it over a sustained period. I was uncomfortable with some of what I wrote.

I believe it was worthwhile, though, in part because I knew others were doing it and commenting on it. 

Could I do it for two weeks? Maybe.

Writing elsewhere 

I’ve written another article for the annual edition of The Dark Pages, the film noir publication. This year’s theme is the movie Sunset Boulevard; my piece concerns landmarks on the real Sunset. 

I became a contributing writer to TDP back in 2018 when I saw that certain film blogger friends wrote regularly for it. Editor Karen Burroughs Hannsberry is easy to write for; her requirements are simple and her enthusiasm for film noir is palpable.

The process for writing a TDP piece isn’t tough: Karen picks a theme, approves a topic or not depending on what everyone else is doing—most of the time she does—and I do the rest. 

The best part, for me, is: no word limit. She makes the articles fit, no matter the length.

TDP is more of a zine than a magazine, yet it’s professionally published. It reminds me of my self-publishing days. Back in the nineties I wrote and drew a comic book and was part of a couple of collectives for small press comics. We would publish monthly zines of our writing and artwork for ourselves, if no one else. 

One would think paper zines would be an anachronism in the twenty-first century, yet they still exist. That’s reassuring.

Writer get-togethers

In October I attended an online writer’s summit. It was like going to a convention in that there were multiple seminars to choose from, plus opportunities to mingle with other writers.

The panels concerned the process of writing, dealing with certain problems associated with writing like writer’s block or neurological conditions like ADHD or dyslexia, and the business itself. 

It verged on self-help at times, and seemed a bit touchy-feely in places, but I gained some valuable insight. It was the first “conference” I had ever attended as a writer.

Miscellany 

2023 has been fairly productive for me in terms of writing. Ever since I made the decision to focus on short stories and essays, as opposed to longer fiction (namely novels), I’ve gotten much more done, particularly in fiction writing. Next year I hope to get published more.

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Subscribe to my Substack newsletter and you can read a two-part piece I wrote about a hike I made back in September on a trail through New York State’s Westchester County. It was quite an adventure.

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In case you missed it: here’s my guest post at the blog Silver Screen Suppers about the Shirley Temple mocktail.

Enjoy the holidays. I’ll be back with one more post for the year on December 20.

@byrichwatson