I’m staring down the barrel of an eleven hour workday at the Festival this morning, which I’m approaching with all the enthusiasm you’d imagine of someone who has required to do a lot of unpaid overtime in the last few weeks.
I’ve been digging into advice for writers about getting things done when your time-poor and (more importantly) burnt out/exhausted, and one of the big suggestions has been that maybe it’s time to start leaning into planning things instead of doing the time-intensive pantsing approach to writing.
Doing a test-run with a short story, following a more detailed version of the Mary Robinette Kowal approach laid out in this blog post. The vision is a nice little six-scene story, taking one of the goofier ideas in my “stories I want to write” notebook, which was basically “Mechs + Curling + Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift.”
The finished version will be very much not that, although I suspect you’ll see the echoes. There are still giant mechs sliding across ice, and some form of race. There’s no logistical world-building sense for that combination — mechs are, by their nature, impractical forms of transport, particularly in a world that’s 90% snow and ice — but I figure if you’re a fan of people piloting giant robots you’re just going to ignore that and if you’re not a fan of giant robots you aren’t reading this story anyway.
It took exactly six sentences for me to stray from the outline, with the main character becoming Maya and DeeCee becoming the nickname for the clunky mech she’s trying to repair, but I will allow the plan makes it relatively easy to sit down and start writing on days like today.
Meanwhile, I finished a draft of my first index card story on the commute home yesterday. Not quite a flash-fiction a week pace, but there’s been very little commuting over the last seven days thanks to overtime, allergic reactions, and conferences.