"A writer must write what [he] has to say, not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
"Here's to failure!" - The Producers (which I still intend to watch; I've seen bits but not the entirety)
Recently I had ample funds to purchase the book The Daily Writer: 366 Meditations to Cultivate a Productive and Meaningful Writing Life by Fred White, published by Writer's Digest, whom I seem to like and trust at the moment (many books about writing are said to be full of bullshit, but I believe there are exceptions). The prompt for July 6 (just a few days ago) instructed the reader to write the most horrid story possible. This is supposed to exaggerate what may be the slightly smaller flaws of said reader's attempts at creating decent fiction. Some of the things I've done in of my crap-story thus far have occurred in ages past, including recent times, such as
- A cliched subject (vampires, with nothing new to offer)
- An overly unoriginal opening ("It was a bright and sunny day.")
- Showing as opposed to telling ("He was the most evil vampire ever," and some lengthy back-story dumps which could use a more subtle spilling; Blake Snyder would have called the latter a "Pope in the Pool." One major flaw from the Lord of the Rings novels is the fact that Mr. Tolkien spelled out way too much to soak in, and in the prologue at that.)
- Effortless naming of characters (Count Smith. What more can I say? I guess I can say that Count-anything is overdone with vampires, and while Smith may be a legitimate name, I'm planning on having Joneses and Harrises too, without any uncommon names.)
- Loose ends (I've only got a handwritten journal page filled, if that, and I've already told - not shown - that Count Smith is the only vampire who can go out in sunlight unharmed. And I don't think I'll concoct any sort of reason for why.)
Will I bring this to writer's group this week? Maybe, if none of my other projects prove worthy - two of the three are very much intended to be at least somewhat good, and one was a "catalyst" to kick-start me into writing something, as my plotted works were not, well, fully plotted yet. Still aren't, although the quality of my characters might have improved marginally. So I've gone from trying to produce a single story in my late desperation to juggling four of them.
