Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Writer's Glut

Writer’s Glut. It’s the opposite of Writer’s Block and is well explained in Doug Smith’s answer to the perennial question ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’:

Actually, from a writer's perspective, the experience is more like this: "Arrgghhh!!! Not another idea! When the @%$#^*! am I ever going to have time to write all these stories?"



I’m experiencing that crisis right now. The Roadmaker novel is crawling along slowly, holding up work on five other story ideas:


• The complex society that has developed on a malfunctioning colony ship. I’ve had this one waiting in the background for years and now have a whole host of information to go with it.
• A mystery story involving bio-augmentation. This one has all the basic ingredients ready to go.
• A lost colony world inhabited by a variety of human-descended races. Ideas still in progress.
• A story that may be set in a Roadmaker-style post industrial future, or possibly a Victorian steampunk past. Just a concept with no plot at the moment.
• A brand new idea, only a couple of weeks old, for a tale set on a planet gravitationally locked with the same face always to its sun. That’s not the main feature of the story, but I don’t want to give away the fun part!



Meanwhile, via the Velcro City Tourist Board’s fabulous list of writing advice, I read an article by Tobias Buckell on trunking stories. I have a couple that I thought might have to go that way, and after reading Tobias’ advice they are definitely heading to the metaphorical trunk. Sniff.

2 comments:

GLP said...

I never trunk anything. If a story of mine doesn't work, it's immediately torn apart and cannibalised by its brothers and sisters.

Anonymous said...

I have at least four long storylines going on and with the advice of GLP I'm gonna F'in' write one on to the end now.

Here's a tool that might help you.

Microsoft OneNote. It's awesome. Categorizes and sub-catagorizes and sub-categorizes your notes and writings.

Never get rid of anything. Worth the money.