Owen's Writing Week 6

As a writer (as a person really) I have a few goals for myself. The first important one is to be published. Another one has more to do with the content of my writing. Specifically I want to incorporate religion and/or politics (with some measure of success of course). The volatile nature of these two subjects continues to confuse me. Simply put, I’m not ready for the expected and unexpected reactions I may or may not get by writing about these subjects. That said, my insecurity doesn’t mean I haven’t tried before. This week’s piece, Flat Planet, is my most ‘daring’ attempt at writing about religion to date. I started Flat Planet with the hope that I would be able to pass this religion/politics block and, in doing so, ‘learn’ how professional writers do it. Of course that was a silly expectation; writing about religion successfully once doesn’t necessarily mean I can do it again.

From my perspective there’s a lot to be said about this piece, both good and bad. For one, it’s a novella that really wants to be a novel. I make comments throughout the piece that really should be expanded, but I never got the chance. Additionally, the setting of the work is different from Earth, enough so that I should spend a great deal of time explaining ‘how the world works’. Any further edits I make would require that I slow down my writing to allow for the proper pace and exposition. This very need prevents me from returning to it for the time being as I currently have other works that I would rather spend my time on, and because I’m still not entirely ready to tackle the subject matter. In this sense the ‘unpublishable’ nature of this piece is slightly different from the previous works; I currently intend to return to it and that the final story will contain many of the same plot points as it does at the moment. Any eventual edit/publish, however, will be so far removed from this blog I feel that it’s okay to post it now.

The voice of this piece is especially interesting (to me at least). I wrote Flat Planet while I was taking a mythology class and so was interested in the oral tradition of story telling. This idea was then incorporated into my own writing via a ‘myth’ that I inserted throughout the piece. The myth is intended to explain some of the taboos associated with certain specific actions, specifically traveling over the Edge of the planet (a driving point of the story). This myth was not a part of the story proper, but rather was meant to enhance the reader’s understanding of the characters’ interactions and decisions. In this way I ran into one of my largest stumbling blocks to date: the two voice narrative. Part of the issue with the two voice narrative is that, at some point in the story, the two voices need to be connected. Unfortunately, the way I had set everything up, I was forced to bend over backward to accomplish this and in the end I, literally, Dues Ex Machinaed by adding god. When I expand Flat Planet into a full novel I plan on playing with the way information is presented so that the two voice narrative is removed.

It must be said that Flat Planet is, though not unique, different when compared to my other writing in that it is an ‘adventure story’. Its plot is mainly driven by characters’ action rather than their thoughts and characterization. Of course, the other example I have of this plot driven adventure story style of writing is The Six. Neither story is necessarily bad given adequate attention, but they don’t fit very well in the workshop environment where short, character driven stories are almost required. Additionally, while I enjoy writing them, sometimes I find that my ability to create a good adventure story is a little loose. In the past I haven’t outlined well enough in advance, which has limited my ability to keep up with the overall flow of the piece (another side effect of concept writing, which I talked about last week).

As a final note I have finished this piece, though I won’t be posting it in its entirety. The last 10+ pages don’t work in a variety of ways, including an overly dramatized reunion and, of course, the (unnecessary) addition of god.