Arriving too Soon

Been discussing with my penpal why I can never finish a short story. He and I agree that we approach writing in two phases. First we free-write to explore the idea of the story then we scoped-write to turn it all into a readable piece. 

I admitted that I don't allow myself enough time to free-write, because as soon as I feel like I'm onto something I become allured by the excitement of having a finished piece and jump into trying to materialize it right away. But this is what I call showing up to the scoped-writing phase too early. Arriving without enough raw material to actually polish.

 I expect the story to just come to me as I write but then that always hits a dead end. It's not a writer's block dead end, it's more of a 'this has gone stale' dead end...
-- My Penpal 

I'm going to unpack more the difference between free-writing and scoped-writing in my next posts.

At some point, I suppose I will explore the nuances of writing fiction. In the meantime, I will maintain my standard position of "who has time for fiction??"
2020-12-07 17:53:02
You know I go through both modes. I 100% understand the sentiment who has time for fiction when there's all this other interesting stuff?! but i guess i'm sentimental about stories because too many times when I'm trying to read non-fiction books and learning and ignoring fiction... i take time to read a fictional piece and it just changes my life...

in a different way than non fiction ever could. I've found both to be indispensible in my lfie. But you're not alone. I know that Jason Fried of Basecamp doesn't read fiction -- > or at least didn't read at one point in his life. His exact argument was that there was too much interesting stuff in 'real' life
2020-12-07 18:31:58
I guess I haven't read a fictional piece that changed my life yet?
2020-12-07 18:53:01
Why are there no pencil pals? Why must this traditional method of correspondence be carried out with ink only?
2020-12-10 15:42:16
I think the term comes from a time when people wrote primarily with pens/ink. I'm pretty sure pencil is the new thing. 

You know how people still call email "e"mail and often use an an envelope as their icon?
2020-12-10 16:03:13
I knew an old guy who used to say, "Carbon me on that email." Only person I've ever heard use that term instead of "copy."
2020-12-10 17:01:08
We need to begin using our own bespoke antiquated terms. Like can we continue calling whatever platform we choose to write on 200WAD? Even if nobody is catually writing 200 words?
2020-12-10 17:11:29
Me too!. At first when it got rebranded as cowriters I felt like I was rebelling just to be an ass. But now it feels warm and sentimental to just say 200WAD.
2020-12-10 17:15:43