I'm fascinated with how writers do their thing. A topic that interests me is how did a particular writer "see the light?" What was the turning point, the audile CLICK as they suddenly got it? In my travels I'm finding that many published writers have that turning point. (Sure, there are those writers who just always got it--understood what they were doing and never truly struggled (not like most of us who are struggling right now), and they've always written publishable work.) For the others, however, there seems to be a common story. They get a story published early in their career. It's a good story. But they can't get anything else published. They languish for years until finally, CLICK, they can consciously see what they did in the first story and replicate it at a conscious level and get published on a regular basis. In the group of writers I've been around, it actually took about 10 years to get from that first story to a conscious realization of the craft that led them to regular publishing.
You published writers you, who get published fairly regularly, what was your turning point? Or if you're unpublished, do you have any stories about published writers you'd like to share?
I'll kick it off. This is from James Van Pelt, who has published over 100 short stories mostly in the sci fi/fantasy/horror genres.
The full blog post: http://jimvanpelt.livejournal.com/122697.html?thread=807753#t807753
Pertinent excerpt:
It wasn't until I really got a handle on conflict that I started to write real stories, I think.
Here's why I was messed up originally. When I took English classes in school, the teachers told us all about conflict, and then had us identify it in the story. The choices were "Man vs. Man," "Man vs. Society," "Man vs. Nature," and/or "Man vs. Himself." There were probably a few other "Man vs. . . ." constructions out there, but you get the gist of it. So, when I started trying to understand stories, and other authors suggested that every story had to have a conflict, I thought I knew what one was.
Silly me.
Here's the definition of conflict that I eventually arrived at that helped me to write stories. It has three parts:
Somebody wants something
Something stands in the way
Something of value is to be lost or gainedA lot of my prewriting or early drafting when working on a story is about my search for the specifics to those three statements.
This might not have been Nancy's turning point, but here's her take on turning ideas into plots.
From Idea to Plot by Nancy Kress
I saw her at a convention a couple of years ago. She said her turning point came when she started using two seemingly different elements in a story, and getting them to work together. I've been trying to find an interview or blog post that talks about this, but unsuccessfully so far.
