Last Week’s Goals
All my blog posts published on schedule.
One submission returned and was sent back out, but another that’s been sitting here for 2 weeks still needs a market.
My next scheduled release date is May 3rd. That’s nine days, and I still don’t know what it will be yet.
I wrote on seven days, and made my daily quota on three of them. I made my weekly quota with only 4,090 words of fiction on the continuing revisions of Swordsmaster #3 (currently 89,592 words.)
Do Readers Notice the Same Things the Writer Does?
I had someone recently say that it must be difficult to write fiction (they’re a non-fiction writer.) I told them writing non-fiction would be harder for me, because I’d have to do research. Writing fiction (especially speculative fiction) is easier because I can just make things up.
I can’t literally make things up and have them work. Over the course of my life I’ve been able to absorb enough knowledge of how things work to be able to write about things well enough to at least make it sound like it makes sense (I can get past the reader’s disbelief filter.) I do research sometimes – for example, I felt the need to know what a reasonable distance for a hose to be ridden in one day, but to be honest, most of the time when I do research it’s in search of inspiration for story ideas.
Writing speculative fiction can involve a lot of detailed world building if you’re not careful. It’s easy for a writer to become so obsessed with their creation that they spend a lot of words trying to show it off to their reader – possibly to the detriment of the story itself.
I will never be accused of including too much detail in my works. At the same time, I can still get side-tracked into possibly unnecessary details.
This past week I spent most of my Swordsmaster #3 revision time creating a calendar so I could better keep track of where all the characters are at any given time. I discovered a problem where two of my characters were supposed to meet at a particular location, but A would get there nine days before B. I spent a day reworking events so that A would get there later than I had them originally, while I found ways for B to arrive sooner at the rendezvous point.
Was this really necessary? The way Swordsmaster #3 is written, I switch a lot between characters, and I don’t include a lot of details in there about how long they’ve been traveling, or what date it is in each scene. For a reader to have caught the inconsistency, they would have had to keep their own charts about how long travel took between different points on the map, and build their own calendar to know when each character was where. I doubt there is any reader who would have done it, so they never would have know.
But I would.
Sometimes we writers obsess over details that only matter to us – perhaps to help make the world we created seem more real for ourselves. I guess that’s reason enough – unless we drown the reader in our reasoning.
Just saying…
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Reaching Out
William Mangieri’s writing has been published on Daily Science Fiction, The Arcanist, Flash Fiction Magazine, and DreamForge. His hundred or so short stories and related collections can be found at several online retailers, including, but not limited to:
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