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Your Home (Act 2, Scene 11)

Prev. Chapter First Chapter Next Chapter Act 2, Scene 11 MELI Alright, my turn. Long story short, I’m a professor (it’s been about 30 years doing that gig). I tried really hard to be good in any of the arts, but the only one that I’ve been any decent at has been teaching. I’ve been to and fro. I have three cats, though one of them is not really mine, she only comes around when she’s hungry.…

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Your Home (Act 2, Scene 10)

PreV. Chapter First Chapter Next Chapter Act 2, Scene 10 FEDE Of what happened afterwards I really did not have the appetite to write down here. Hell, I could barely remember it. Fortunately, Camila has her subtle and unsubtle ways of convincing me to do the things that I want to do; if she didn’t I doubt we would be married. I kept working in the same area, rudderless and with the little…

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Your Home (Act 2, Scene 9)

Prev. Chapter First Chapter Next Chapter Act 2, Scene 9 MELI In When Harry Met Sally, our two main lovebirds discuss the dilemma of men and women being able to be just friends, or if attraction will always get in the way; that’s the same thing Fede and I were chatting on our way to the airport, half a year later of our fight in the movie theater. By this point we had forgotten how not to be…

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Your Home (Act 2, Scene 8)

PreV. Chapter First Chapter Next Chapter Act 2, Scene 8 Meli begins monologuing just like in any other scene. MELI: I was at the movie theater watching When Harry Met Sally on a late-night showing, taking a rest from working on next year’s application artwork, when Fede finally popped out of my head. He needed a shave and a shower. Now that movie is permanently ruined for me. Meli turns to…

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Your Home (Act 1, Scene 7)

Prev. Chapter First Chapter Next Chapter Act 1, Scene 7 MELI The picture he had painted of his folks did not really fit the people I had met in the Distrito Federal. Mellow old folks that were hard to read, which goes to show just how close the apple falls from the tree. It was a good distraction from the chaos of my Dad’s passing, anyhow. Still, distractions have to come to an end and real…

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Your Home (Act 2, Scene 6)

PreV. Chapter First Chapter Next Chapter Act 1, Scene 6 FEDE “Yeah, yeah. I know it’s gonna suck, put please do it for me, Fede. There’ll be a day where you won’t get the chance to see them again.” And that’s how she convinced me to have her meet my parents. Four years had passed since the last time I had set foot in the Distrito Federal. It was the winter of 89’. We landed and they were…

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Your Home (Act 2, Scene 5)

Prev. Chapter First Chapter Next Chapter Act 2, Scene 5 MELI If there’s something that can without fail piss me off is the way so freely assume that I hated my father. I know; we were always fighting. All the time we were fighting, but never once did either of us want the other to lose. My mother once explained to me when I was  very young that fighting was the only way Dad had ever…

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Your Home is back, baby. We're halfway there.

A web serial in which two dummies find out they can live inside each others head and then then, tragically, decide to do just that.

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My Experience with (Two Types of) Writer's Block

One type of writer's block I've had experienced is what I'd describe as a Block of Quality. Such a block comes from the doubt that whatever you may render onto paper or screen today will be any good. All the words that come to your head seem trite and wrong, unworthy of being written. Your ideas no longer seem worthwhile, the point where to start or to continue has receded into the earth, and the horrid mass of content required to finish has become seemingly insurmountable.

What to do you do? Since this is (I think) the most common block, the list of answers is long and often repeated. Keep Writing (TM), take a breather, Read More (also TM), set a schedule, etc.

Personally, I think at the core of the matter is accepting that expecting something to be good from the outset is hubris and unfair to yourself. The classic "Writing is Rewriting (TM)."

The other type of block I have faced recently is a bit trickier, and I shall call Block of Purpose.

This one was very interesting to me because, I knew (or thought I knew) what I should be writing, the scenes and beats I had sketched out a long time ago.

I'm not saying every word has to have a set meaning (the thought alone is nauseating) but that if you ask me what's the point of this scene or its elements I can answer something, no matter how vague.

So I asked myself, what's the point?, and found it a difficult, but not impossible question. If I had to narrow down what got me out of the woods it would be, firstly, that I reinforced the plot function of the current scenes. What information are the characters learning? What information is the reader learning? What's being paid off? What's being set up?

The other step was the harder one, more personal one, which was making what I was writing exciting to myself, not only the reader. You see, those scenes were functional, but not fun. New information constantly in interesting locales with interesting characters, maybe, but with no sense of urgency. Checkpoint writing.

Blegh.

So I added some spice. I allowed myself to be my own audience for a second and asked what would make me ask "what the fuck?" out loud when reading this part of the story, and so I did. Now I'm back to a stable daily word count.

The bottom line, I think, is that we can trick ourselves into thinking our writing is more set in stone than it really should be. We think that the story or tone should go a certain way because we said so months ago when we made the treatment or outline of the plot. Inevitably we then find that not all our assumptions are correct and what we thought we could enjoy or easily write we can't. But the creation of that outline was then, and now is now. What only matters today is creating, not following some guideline or expectation, even if that guideline was created by yourself.

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this comic has done irreversible damage to my DNA. go read it now.

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Propaganda:

Leon S. Kennedy

-lo siento pero leon kennedy siempre me ha dado vibras de whitexican q es buena onda pero a veces sí se le sale lo whitexican rico hijo de papi q va a 1 de las top universidades privadas del país

Murdoc Niccals

-Murdoc Niccals, el compa tiene trauma religioso e imagenes cristianas

-Murdoc Niccals de Gorillaz, tubo pedos con la migra

-Murdoc Nicclas, sus jefes salieron de latino america para buscar mejor chamba y el chamaco se les hizo rockerito

-Murdoc Niccals, Católico rockerito bisexual, qué más ocupa?

[mariowritesforyou]

Be strategic about which part you're writing.

Some parts of writing are easier and get done faster than other parts, that's just a law of the universe.

Me? My productivity gets destroyed when I have to go back on the chapter after sketching out the dialogue and add the action and flavor in between each line. Happened recently in an interrogation scene where, I stop to see the stopwatch (not the timer!) and it tells me I'm three quarters through today's writing quota, but then the word count tells me I'm only at the halfway point of my desired daily output.

I like seeing that number go up, I'm a simple creature like that, but I simply know that fleshing out a scene takes me longer than starting one, and the more detailed the scene gets the longer I spend on it and the more frustrated I get at the lack of volumetric progress.

Then I get an idea:

why not treat myself by pausing the difficult writing and do what comes easier for me?

And so the rest of the session I spent starting a new chapter, which is where I can get into the flow state where I just semi-consciously produce and produce and produce. Boom, half of my word count done in half the time it usually takes.

I believe this is another example of the Pareto principle, better known as the "80/20 rule", which stipulates that "80% of outcomes (or outputs) result from 20% of all causes (or inputs) for any given event"; outcomes in this case being word count, and causes being writing time.

It took me a while before I understood that writing (as in sit-your-ass-down-and-get-typing writing) doesn't have to be a linear pursuit. Sometimes, chipping away at a roadblock will start giving you diminishing returns, and perhaps a change of pace is necessary.

For this, you have to know yourself as a writer; what your quirks and strengths are, and play up to them. Of course, for how much they may suck, the difficult parts could have a lot to add to the story, so we will eventually have to come back to them. However, we should always know that the easier parts will be waiting for us with warm, open arms.

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I invite you to read Your Home

If you like romance, magic realism, some 80s history, and most importantly, if you have ever wondered what it would be like to literally live inside someone's head, I recommend you read this web serial I've been uploading for the past two months or so.

Each chapter is a light, fun, two to three minutes long on average and switches from the perspective of our two loving leads.

Right now the first act (of two) is complete, with the second act starting November 1st, 2023.

And no, don't worry, the whole story is finished, but in my native Spanish. I just need the time to translate the chapters so we can finish the story together.

Thanks to everyone who has been keeping up with this story so far, you are amazing and I hope you enjoy the rest.

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Your Home (Act 1, Scene 18)

In which our couple has a nightmare and the first half of this story is concluded.

PreV. Chapter First Chapter Next Chapter Act 1, Scene 18 FEDE Meli slept in the Corpses’ house while I tried to sleep in her head, which was obviously a failure. Some of my jitters I had washed away with some tequila, but the wrongness remained.  I could still smell that tiny room in the theater: sweat, paint and iron. The boy held his wound, a knife wound, with indifference. He told me:…

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Your Home (Act 1, Scene 17)

In which the police shows up.

Prev. Chapter First Chapter Next Chapter Act 1, Scene 15 MELI Fede wasn’t as interested in the director’s proposal as I sort of expected, and an awkward silence ensued. To break it, I suggested going for tacos, but then Rolo, Berto’s self-titled guerrilla brother, loudly entered the theater bleeding from the side. Safe to say my appetite was gone. Berto shouted: “Rolo! We gotta go, they’re…

[mariowritesforyou]

Try writing a "plot irrelevant" scene

We all have it drilled into our our literary heads: every piece of writing, every scene, every beat, every single sentence has to have a purpose or be justified for its inclusion on the plot.

I'm a big fan of justifying my narrative decisions but sometimes the writing can't have a purpose right from the moment it's being written.

So much bandwidth is allocated to the intensive brain-intensive process of putting stuff to words, I feel I should myself some slack if I can't fit them into the overarching themes or theses.

This especially becomes a problem on longer works where there's so much room for meaning and mistakes and mishaps. Worrying that everything has to be foreshadowing or pay off or symbolic can sap the enjoyment of building a scene and thus, kill the velocity of writing it.

So, how about if we just don't care for a bit?

Write a scene or sequence that you sort of know might make the cutting room floor, but has something in it for you if you write it, be it spending time with your favorite characters, coming up with lines for later, or fleshing out the tone. Imagine outlandish meetings of characters that would not meet otherwise, see how they react to situations unseen inside the plot.

You see, we know that readers need variety in a story, but the writers need the variety too. There's a point of critical saturation where chipping away at something will yield diminishing returns whose solution is often to rest by doing something different. Your brain will still be working on that plot thread you left on pause, but in a freer, open and more relaxed state on the background.

A bit of horizontal progress can go a long way for vertical progress.