The Week in Words - 2/24/25 - 3/9/25
On Falling Behind and Spontaneity
Output - Synthesis
I fell behind with Avalanche and needed to stop struggling to recover. Falling behind, mind you, is entirely a mental construct. If there is no deadline, then there is no falling behind. But don’t tell my brain that—it would rather hurry and rush and press and try way too hard.
I pivoted to working on something else for a little bit. I need to embrace the fact I’m behind and completely dissolve my self-imposed timeline. I’m not at the best of stopping points, but there never really is a good one anyway.
Whenever I take a break from Avalanche, I come up with a goal for what I want to work on. When I wrote Movement and Repose, it was to write something simple and contained and allusive after being neck-deep in Levi and Maribel’s story. For Mental Stronghold, it was to refine my understanding of story structure.
This break is to work on spontaneous writing—“pantsing” if you will. I plan everything to death because I’ve (wrongly) convinced myself that I can’t write a scene without a comprehensive plan of attack.
I want to practice flow in order to help me write <Avalanche> without so much weight on my shoulders. Spontaneous writing will help break down my ongoing excuse that “I don’t know enough about the scene in order to start,” which is my biggest hurdle.
The membrane for new work had been pushing so hard that it didn’t take long for it to pay dividends. I wrote a new flash fiction piece that I’m gonna post later this week. I also wrote an article about my writing toolkit—something that I’d kicked around writing for months now, but kept convincing myself that it wasn’t interesting and mostly a silly exercise in self-indulgence. Yet usually when an idea stays with me for awhile, it means it needs to see the light of day. I hope I’ve made it interesting.
Output - Data
Total: 6,722 words (14 pages [2,856] + 3,866 typed)
Days of Writing: 8/14 days (.571 WrPCT)
AWD: 840/day
Words Added to New Story or New Article: 1,376
Ratio: 20
Longest Day: 3/6/25 - 1,614 words (3 pages [612] + 1,002 typed)
The Still Bleepin’ Counts Award: 3/7/25 - 204 words (1 page)
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Input - Synthesis
In order to help me write short stories, I picked up Amy Hempel’s Sing to It, which is a book of stories published after her collected works. It’s brand new material from one of my favorite authors, and boy was I floored. She is able to spin an entire story through the use of words as precision instruments. With only a few hundred words, she leaves you thinking about the piece, its shrapnel implanted in spite of its lithe nature.
Which is exactly what I’m trying to accomplish: a complete story, no matter how small. As George Saunders put it, “A short story is not just a series of events, one following another. It’s not a lively narrative that briskly continues for a number of pages, then stops. It’s a narrative that compels us to finish reading it, yes, but that, in the midst of itself, somehow rises or expands and becomes… enough.”
For a plot to be a story, it must resonate somehow. And hopefully I can learn about this resonance through reading some really kickass examples.
Input - Data
Book: The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Starting Page: 17
Ending Page: 45
Days Read: 2
Pages Read: 28
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Book: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
Starting Page: 47
Ending Page: 55
Days Read: 2
Pages Read: 9
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Book: Sing to It by Amy Hempel
Starting Page: 0
Ending Page: 45
Days Read: 2
Pages Read: 45
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6/14 days (.429 rPCT)
Combined Pages Read: 82
Combined Pages Per Day: 13
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⥁⥀⥁ Update Archives
⥁⥀⥁ Fiction
⥁⥀⥁ Appendices
⥁⥀⥁ Non-Fiction
Try reading 12 Stories by Steinbeck. I think it's 12 Stories but I could be wrong. They are fascinating with lots of things in them to think about & consider. It's actually one of my favorites even though I usually shy away from short stories for some reason.