Jeff Deck, Author & Novel Coach
Tell the story you're meant to tell.
This is a question that people ask famous authors a lot, and some of them, like Stephen King, get a bit tired of the question. After all, the *where* seems to an author a lot less important than the *what*, the material you can pull from these “ideas” to mold into an actual freaking story. Ideas can come from anywhere, right? Even the most banal gesture or advertisement or association could lead to an interesting tale.
Continue reading “Where do you get your ideas?”
Attempting to reboot on several levels here. For the last few months I was working at a newspaper full-time, which combined with up to ten hours of freelancing each week pretty much destroyed my brain and by extension progress in the realm of writing and editing fiction. Turns out that a 50- or 60-hour week is a real motivation-killer.
To get myself back into a writing frame of mind, I’ll be posting on here more or less regularly for a while. Sometimes the key to breaking the dam is just… uh, I don’t know, tinking at it a little bit with a hammer. See, I can’t even do fucking metaphors anymore. This is ridiculous.
Whew. Let’s start simple. I’m Jeff Deck, and I’m really into writing stories and stuff.
Er… for some reason the word “derp” is coming to mind here.
This blog, whatever its previous incarnations — which you can witness by trawling the detritus and wreckage of past entries — will now be acting as a kind of sketchpad. I’ve incorporated a new WordPress theme for a cleaner look. I’ve also, and this is crucial, disabled comments. I’m sorry if you tried to leave me a comment on this blog during the last, oh, year or so? There were several hundred spam comments to wade through… it’s been an ongoing problem. Weeds in the untended garden and all that. Maybe this needs to be more of a monologue than a dialogue, at least for a while.
If you really want to respond to something, just e-mail me at jeffdeck [at] jeffdeck.com.
Hey, so here we are again. Another successful NaNoWriMo is behind me, and now I’m working on editing the book I was working on before November. Its title is still in flux; indeed, a lot of things are still in flux, though the basic structure and details are intact.
For some reason, I’m having trouble settling down into the rhythms of editing, or even identifying what they’re supposed to be. This is an interesting conundrum for someone who’s done a whole hell of a lot of editing in his career. It’s not so much big-picture stuff, as I have the plot in place– probably those dozen chapters are not going to change drastically, though there might be a new chapter or two cropping up in there to fill in some details. No, it’s these individual plot threads and details that need to be nailed down… does it make sense that this character is doing this, and does the arc work throughout the book? Does this theme get developed enough? Are your futuristic details consistent? (Oh yeah, it takes place around 2040.)
There’s a fairly regular danger of getting bogged down in too much interesting “research,” reading books and articles, while not tinkering enough with the main text. Tinkering, editing, changing, is not immersion in the story in the way that the original writing is. It’s immersion in the words, the jacket the story’s wearing, the skin, the surface. Very easy to get distracted by other things, like the thought of writing shiny new words for some other story, or doing something like playing a video game with its already-constructed world ready to embrace you.
I say this approaching the end of a long weekend with disappointingly little progress to show in the book, as December trudges on with or without my consent. I think the trick might be immersion, still, thinking back to the NaNoWriMo experience still so fresh in my mind. But that immersion in the book must be built around it, in the spaces of my life, the time not already claimed by work or sleep.
So, how to build that immersion? Appropriate music could help, tied to the environments of the story, conjuring that mood that evokes the world of the book. But sound can easily be lost or broken– images need to be there too. Images that remind me of Kamukamp, the city that is the setting of the book, and the offices and homes involved in the story, and also the fictional game world that comes into play. And visual representations of the plot flow, that might also keep me thinking about all those steps and twists and turns between beginning and ending.
Above all, it’s about keeping the book fixed in my mind. Whatever the tricks, whatever the shortcuts to that mental focus. Because I think in editing, just like in writing, only when you’re fully engaged in that story, when you daydream about it, when you dream about it, when it keeps hiding around the corners of your thoughts– only then can you start really jamming.
I have leveled up! No longer am I level 6 – sophomore freelancer. I can now proudly call myself “Level 7 – Adequate Freelancer.” I can already feel the adequacy just rolling off me in waves.
Expanding my horizons a bit with some writing assignments — I’ll keep you posted as to where and when you can take a peek, if you’re so inclined. Am also kicking off some more involvement in the writing and editing communities. I have to emerge now and again into the daylight, yes? There are other folks out there committed to a life by the written word, and many insights to learn and share.