Upon publishing the second draft of the short story CAPTAIN OLIVER HAS LOST HIS DRIVE here on the Scafverse, I immediately succumbed to a 40 hour bout (and counting– I’m sitting up for the first time and writing this) with some kind of crazy stomach bug or food poisoning through most of which I slept.

In those moments between sleep and awake I thought about the process through which I created CAPTAIN OLIVER– converted to text whatever thought dripped from my brain as it did, with no consideration to form or structure (in advance of writing or otherwise).  While writing is an art (hence whatever dripped from my brain) it is also a craft, a set of practical skill that can be learned– and the next step is to work on those skills.  When I look at one of my stories I want to think, “Good story, well told.”  Frankly, I do think they are good stories, but are they told the best way possible?  Could someone else tell my story better? If so, why?

Most advice that I’ve read suggests that upon submission of a work, always and immediately start on a new piece– and I can see why– the urge to continue to tinker is strong.  Food poisoning is not the preferred method; it effectively stops one from tinkering– but does not stop one from thinking.  I already feel the little bit of distance created in the past day and half– when I pick it up again in a few weeks, probably after I’ve written something else, I’ll be able to look at it in an objective, and potentially horrified manner.

So if I want to follow that advice my fevered brain did indeed come up with a new short story plot involving the abandoned hulk of a ship from CAPTAIN OLIVER.  I will not, however, write it or anything else– at least not until I’ve put in some time on the self-study program to understand the form and structure of writing as I suggested in “A Novel Change In the Scafverse”.  I’ll know it’s time when I can identify the techniques I employed, or even should have employed, by name.  I’ll toy with writing the next one not by dripping it from my brain, but rather according to some universal forms (not formulas) of successful writing.  For a refresher, here is my body of knowledge for self-study: Goodreads.  And with that, I have some studying to do.

A quick aside:  The first draft of this short story was a crime against the humanities.  But I couldn’t write a second draft without writing a first.   Writing an 8,000 word short story fills me with a bit a dread over writing a 90,000+ word novel– I must admit I was pretty sick of the rewrite by the time I called it a second draft, not to mention that it took almost an hour to read through it, making longer term story arcs much tougher to track– and this was a pretty simple first person, chronological narration that took place over 8 days.  Not sure how it is going to work in the novel with 12 story arcs, thousand of years non-linear and multiple person POV’s!  Some authors report rewriting their novels ten to twenty times!!!