Runaway Story

I try to be short and to the point, I really do, but this story is getting away from me. Currently, I'm looking at 16 to 30 pages plus 8 to 16 more that I haven't edited and there's still a lot of stuff I need to write. My goal is to keep the story below 30 pages.

It's times like this that I look back fondly on the days when I had writer's block.

I would sit there, literally all night, write out a sentence, decided it sucked, throw it away, and start over again. If I was lucky, I managed to write one page, but usually I ended up with nothing.

These days I plop down in the chair and force myself to write about a page, and then reward myself with some quality time on World of Warcraft. I realize that it still probably stinks, but hey, I still get to play WoW. After about a month and a half of this I have 30 to 45 pages to work with.

Then the dreaded editing process starts.

The goal is to shrink the story down 30 pages or less. Cut out all the fluff and drivel (well most of it anyways), so that what's left is just the essentials.

At least that's the theory.

The reality is that I'm faced with 30 to 45 pages of drivel that I can try to splice together into something comprehensible. This prospect alone is enough to get me to shuffle off and spend lots of quality time with WoW in order to avoid it.

So, the good news is that I don't have anywhere near the problem with writer's block that I used to. The bad news is that now I have editor's block.

Why Write About StarWars?

StarWars remains one of my guilty pleasures. Writing about it is like going out the back door to smoke...or at least it would be if I smoked...but you get the idea. The thing is, if I start with the assumption that what I'm writing is crap, I can actually write. When I start out by trying to make something good I run into writer's roadblock similar to the blockades one might encountered during the manhunt for a serial killer. I find the StarWars universe to be so silly, even by its own standards, that anything I could do is peanuts by comparison. What's more, there has been so much bad stuff written by fans over the years that, no matter how bad my writing is, I can probably point to someone who is actually worse. That someone could be worse than me was a great comfort when I started. This combination of things made writing the story much easier to write than it would have otherwise been; and what's more I actually wrote something. I harp on that point because I've encountered a lot of people who haven't. Not a damn thing. When I ask them what they want to write, they say a novel. I look at them and think: "but for the grace of StarWars there go I."