Then he was laying on the dance floor, the bright lights bouncing off the disco ball into his eyes, a big fat bully pinning him down.
Best part. if
Adagia
bugged out and made you lose all your content... and you weren't too pissed to be willing to rewrite it -- probably on a separate text editor -- this is the thing i'd start with.
George Saunders
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
storytelling
A common pitfall in
storytelling
is not choosing to tell a story that leaves the character changed forever. I was sitting outside feeling summer breeze under a tree when this thought came to me:
We fear changing our characters forever because we fear it in our own lives. We want to...
Just so in a story: we should always be pushing the new bead to the knot. If you know where a story is going, don’t hoard it. Make the story go there, now. But then what? What will you do next? You’ve surrendered your big reveal. Exactly.
Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we don’t have anything else. And this can be a form of trickery. Surrendering that thing is a leap of faith that forces the story to attention, saying to it, in effect, You have to do better than that, and now that I’ve denied you your trick, your first-order solution, I know that you will.
At the end of our final meeting there was a question in the air of how we might keep in touch now that are club was over. I think we developed a good amount rapport over the short spans of six
Zoom
calls, and there was no obvious place where...
There were no specific examples in the form of sentences of the first two. There were specific attributes however.
I believe the thing you are trying to deliberately avoid -- keeping the reader in the dark chasing you -- was one thing that made the first two more theatrical. Just the right mix of details and meaningful action (
George Saunders
likes meaningful action vs the word plot lol ).
I think that because you were following
William Gibson
to a tee you got that for free. Kind of like getting a ton of things for free when following the conventions of an
MVC
webapp via
Ruby on Rails
or
Laravel
.
I think these last two assignments reveal how difficult it is to get that blend of details + meaningful action right. I think going forward that would be a great Daniel thing to hone your craft on, but given that this is the final week of
Echo and Narcissus
club it's a good opportunity to just do some more Gibson copying.
PS I'm already reading that Saunders' book
Maggie Appleton
mentioned and it is so necessary for fiction writers. You will love it. Please check it out. I hope Maggie does end up organizing a club around it!
drewb
