Well, I’m halfway through the six weeks of Odyssey, and it’s been a great learning experience so far. I also feel like I’ve gotten some good writing done.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, though. Last weekend, after writing almost 2000 words of a story I figured would end up at around 4000, I realized my character structure didn’t work and the story was filled with boring internal monologue. And the climax would involve my main character being forced choose between (A) allowing the world and everyone in it to remain in a bad situation he had accidentally caused, or (B) fixing the problem. Oh, what a terrible moral dilemma he faces! How can he possibly choose between the two?
Worse, I came to realize there was no way to fix the problem without starting the story over almost from scratch, and that realization came at about 5am, three hours before I had to turn in a story. And I didn’t really know how to fix the problem, anyway.
So I took a different idea I’d been thinking about for a few months, and over the next two and a half hours I wrote it in 1000 words and turned it in.
I spent far longer than two and a half hours revising that story today, based on the critiques I received earlier this week. I’ve fixed various problems, but I may have created others. Oh well. I think it’s done, so I’ll probably mail it off to a market next week.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a 5500-word short story that I consider one of my best. Because it was getting a private critique from guest author Elizabeth Hand instead of a general critique, I didn’t get feedback on it until yesterday. She liked the story, but had some very good suggestions regarding things that needed to be changed. I plan to revise it and submit it for a general critique. (Fortunately, I don’t think it will take as long to revise as my 1000-word short story did.)
One of the reasons that story turned out as well as it did is because Jeanne Cavelos (the main instructor here at Odyssey) gave me some good advice about developing the characters. She told me to figure out what the characters’ goals and fears were. After doing that, I saw how the plot had to work, and was able to outline the story and then write it.
And–here is something that I’ve tried to avoid learning, but I’m now being forced to learn–I had to throw out the 750 words I had already written in that story and start again from scratch. (That’s not something Jeanne suggested, it’s just something I realized I had to do in order to make the story work better.) I hate starting a story over. But sometimes it has to be done.
It has to be done with that unfinished story, too. But after meeting with Jeanne and discussing the characters, I have a much better understanding of how that story needs to work, too.
Hopefully I’m learning enough that I’ll be able to work out that character stuff without Jeanne’s advice after leaving Odyssey.
(And for those who have read my published stories and think my characters are fine…thanks! In my successful stories, my characters usually work, but that’s generally a happy accident. I’m hoping to learn how to create characters that work on purpose.)