Did you know that if you start tonight and write 603ish words a night until August 26th, 2012 (which just happens to be the last night before my fall semester begins – sidebar {should be my last semester before graduating}) that you will have written right around 50,000 words and might just be ready to write “The End” on a short novel.

Go!

My wife and I were watching a commercial the other day. One of those commercials asking for money to save the dogs or kids or something like that came on the TV. Toward the end they mentioned that when you send in your money, they will send you a duffel bag with their logo on it. My wife sassily said,

“I need a tote bag to show people what I support.”

What kind of things does your character carry around that instantly identify them as a certain kind of person? Do they carry it because they want people to think that or is it really just an important part of who they are?

Get writing.

I found a few articles recently that definitely seemed like ready made near future sci-fi plots or devices that might inspire you to start writing a new story or give one a new direction to grow into:

• A company in Japan is apparently planning to actually build a space elevator by 2050. There is some nice information in the Slashdot comments to describe some of the limitations and difficulties of such a venture.
• This  gadget would make an interesting device in a sci-fi thriller or spy type of story. But you might want to disguise it as something a little more subtle before your character starts depositing them all over the city.
• I never knew that Google provided access to public transportation stuff on their maps. That information will get better as the years go by and maybe with some kind of neural HUD, would be a great way to escape someone or get somewhere important in a very short amount of time. Or maybe the information gets so relied upon that the providers might not be quite reliable. Maybe all of the routes start leading you past a new restaurant that knows how to buy the best kind of advertising. Or perhaps a bad guy learns how to hack the system and instead of fleeing from him, you are actually moving right where he wanted you to go all along.

Whether you use these ideas or some of your own, get writing!

A friend and I challenged each other to write 1000 words of new fiction last week. Then throughout the week we checked in and said how we were doing. And, no big surprise, we both finished our 1000 words.

I managed to get close to double that done without really working too hard on it which probably shows up in the quality of the writing but bad rough draft writing is always better than good plans of writing that never end up getting written.

I did a few things that helped me reach the goal:

• Wrote during the day on my iPod Touch which I always carry. Little 50 word sittings add up over the week. Each day I copied all of that into my more permanent document.
• Wrote during the kids swim class. I normally sit around and read or fight to stay awake.
• Wrote before I went to bed several times.
• Didn’t worry about going back and correcting much. It is just a rough draft so I didn’t feel any of that was really necessary.
• Didn’t worry about other stories rattling around my brain. I just focused on this one. This is frequently a big stumbling block for me.

So what did I end up with.

Most of a short story rough draft. There are two specific scenes that I didn’t get around to writing. Adding them in and improving the descriptions in the story would probably make it about 3000 words which feels like a good length for it. I’ll probably work on adding those scenes and then doing the editing over the next few weeks because it would feel really nice to finish an actual, full first draft and even better to carry it through a round of editing or two.

I had an idea about halfway through the draft that I decided to try. It ended up changing it from a short story to a first chapter of something longer. But I don’t think I really want to go down the full novel route so I will probably just keep it as a nice short story by reworking a couple minor points along the way.

I have virtually no free time and so many big idea plans in my head of things that I want to do and add to an already packed schedule. Instead of making big grandiose writing plans of finishing a novel and winning the Hugo this year, I’m focusing small on my hobby writing.

Really small.

100 words a day.

That frequently takes five to ten minutes. Or less if I have a good idea what I plan to write.

100 words is something that you can do while on hold waiting for a conference call to start at work or while the kids brush their teeth or before you fall asleep or while you wait in line or during a commercial break. 100 words is really nothing at all and barely worth doing.

But.

100 words a day will get me about 3000 words a month pretty easily which would be enough for a rough draft of most of the short stories that I think up. 100 words also frequently turns into 150 when you finish out the paragraph or 500 when you hit a neat little groove. So it is completely reasonable to expect that to turn into about 4-5000 words a month.

Do that for a year and you have a short rough draft of a short novel. Or just a bunch of crappy sentences that count as practice while learning what it takes to right a battle scene or a conversation between a father and son or a political under the table deal or whatever you happen to be hacking away on with your writing.

So far it has gotten me over 1000 words in the last week on the details, details, details story I am working on.

I just started reading American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. I am only a couple chapters in and already drowning in details. Everything, everything and everything is described. Which right away helps define the characters and the things that are important to him by what he decides to tell us and say about them. Instead of just saying he is a rich, elitist type of dude or having other characters say it about him, you learn it by the things the he buys and the things he scoffs others for thinking about and buying.

It provides an interesting distance between the main character and the other characters since there is so much focus on the things and details and less about what he thinks about them.

I have an idea for a plot that I have never started because I can’t get very interested in the main character. One of those destined hero kids.

It might be interesting to tell the story from the older guide who initially saves him and drags him through the world but doesn’t actually like the kid but have that guide character focus on the details to an excessive degree instead of the kid. He could kind of create an emotional distance to the kid by nearly ignoring him and getting lost in the details of the world and the mission. The kid could practically turn into luggage which could present its own problems later on in the story.

Hmm. Sounds like I need to open up a text editor soon and start pounding away.

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.” -Helen Keller

I have a full day of work followed by volunteer hours at the library followed by homework hours as I head into the final week of summer school. So my small goal today is to get started on a story that I outlined yesterday and just write about 250 words of the first scene.

What small tasks are you going to heroically attack today on the way to your larger goal?

I have a few writing articles that I like to re-read whenever I need a kick of inspiration. This is one of my favorites about how long it takes to learn to be a writer. One million words.

I would guess that I’m around 100,000 which means any day now…

One of my goals would be to get to around 200,000 in the next year.

How far along our you on your path of practicing writing fiction? What kind of schedule do you have yourself on to get through those million words?

Here is a photo prompt for you.

What are these guys up to?

Are they celebrating the birth of a new baby? Are they celebrating their city’s football team winning the championship? Are they plotting a bank robbery? Or did they just invent a new three person, every man for himself, thumb wrestling game?

I have a few ideas for stories that have been in my head for years. I have played with most of them off and on over that time frame and failed to finish the story. Normally it is because I like the idea and don’t want to “waste” it on a crappy story.

But right now I am a mostly crappy writer. A lot of that is because I don’t finish and edit very many stories. And a lot of that is because I am afraid of wasting good ideas….

Lame.

Especially since ideas are anywhere and everywhere.

Especially since it is stopping me from finishing stories.

The bigger question is how to fix it. I would imagine that I need to just write stories. Finish stories. Edit stories. And then submit stories to try to get them published.

Then the story will be done and I can work on the next idea.

So, let’s get started on a short story that I started a rough draft of about three years ago about a bunch of women gossiping at one of those Tupperware type of parties where the gossip turns to a bit of petty revenge at the end.

And let’s add some potential public shame to this. The story needs to be finished and submitted somewhere before October 20th. That’s an insanely long deadline for this story but the Writers’ Journal Write to Win! story prompt for October 20th is “Hey what are you…” which could absolutely work for my story.

So final draft due by October 20th. If it ends up being under 1500 words, submit it to this contest. If not, pick somewhere else and have it in the mail by October 20th.