HoneyPot: Deadlines and Expectations are Bad for your Heart
Now, I'm not pretentious enough to say that there's a magic formula you just have to follow and bam, instant success, instant writer, instant Pulitzer.
Personally, I wouldn't hold prizes too close to my chest, considering that the aforementioned were awarded to things like "The Old Man and the Sea" (about as entertaining as The Old Man TV series) and "To Kill a Mockingbird," which I don't even have to address. I mean, school reading, hello? Maybe the others are great, IDK.
With all that said, I just realized that perhaps other horror fans, the only real literary genre worth mentioning, may benefit from "my process." Note this is exclusively for writers or aspiring writers.
Part of that realization came when I found myself repeating the same things in my critiques over and over. What can I say, I don't know 3.000 Pi numbers like your average super-smart prota.
From what I could gather, there's basically a three-step process: gathering, planning, and execution. Then comes the editing, but I doubt anyone has trouble and needs deadlines to fill in text for plot holes and grammar errors.
-Gathering is the process through which you do "your research" about the subject you want to treat. Most of this is done passively by reading stuff. You're there, reading the latest best-selling garbage, thinking "Man, this plot was so promising, wish the author didn't do this or that," give it a couple more novels and suddenly you find yourself with some cool idea, like having killer bees that trick people into eating poisonous honey, made out of their marrow bone or something.
-A common mistake made by pro authors with published stuff is to over-research a topic actively. Anyone here read "Mountains of Madness" by Love&Craft? Betcha did. Betcha know what I'm talking about. Don't beat yourself up for not knowing enough. If your helicopter has an ignition key instead of an intricate powering system, so be it, am I right? Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, etc. It's far worse to have this sciency character info dumping the hell out of you with stuff that, you know what? readers will skim past. You think I care about the tools used by your mining crew, Lovey? No, I don't. I'm here for the tentacly monsters!
-It's OK to go back and forth from gathering to planning if needed. Try not to go back if you're already executing, can't change a horse in the middle of the river, as they say.
-Planning is pretty straightforward. Did you ever notice that chapters in novels have a certain order to them? That there's a certain amount of things happening, dialogues excluded, before a chapter concludes? No? Just me? Well, source "Trust me, bro".
-When planning a short story or a novel, simply make a bullet point of the events that are supposed to happen. There are two events per 1500-word chapter, and a short story typically lasts for about three chapters that are merged into one. Just sort of work out the transition, you'll be fine. Probably.
E.G. Title: Honeypot (heh)
-Bee MC is lazily strolling around her zone, chilling, moisturized, happy. Collecting pollen and doing bee stuff
-A bunch of kids come and stomp her glorious, hardly earned flower garden.
-MC stings one of them. Don't worry, she doesn't die. She's a bumblebee, not a regular honey bee. Kids leave. MC happy again.
-Kids return the day after to poke the nest, destroying it in retaliation
-They steal the little honey the nest had produced, and come out unscathed as they were wearing some unholy glimmering white armor. What? Some dramatization is needed. We're storytellers, not fact checkers. Speaking of which, f those guys, 'may right?
-MC bee convinces the nest in a distress of their next step. That's right. Killer honey. They produce a decoy nest and fill it with honey made from the most poisonous-looking flowers in the Forbidden Garden, and wait for the kids to come again. They poke the nest, it falls down, and they eat the honey. They scream in agony and perish. Vanquished! Epilogue: MC is elected queen. Kidding, don't do the epilogue.
-Then, you proceed to execution. For me, it takes about six continuous hours, but it can take less or more time depending on your schedule and typing skills.
Now we have the short story, and guess what? no one cares. You can have three dozen of these and still no one will care, and you know what? that's fine. You can still submit stuff, going to the nest and hoping for the best, but it's bad for your heart to have expectations. Take it from a guy who stopped writing for a year after getting rejec over and over again. Not even my dad wants to read my stuff, but IDC because I know it's cool.
You know what's the coolest thing about not expecting to get published or making money out of your craft? No one is hurrying you. Want to take a sabbatical? Cool. Feel like planning a bunch of stuff, and making nothing? That's fine. You'll pick later the coolest one. Does pumping novels like one of these "best-selling authors" make you a better one? No, no, it doesn't. Write something you wanna read, something that's cool to you, something that you wonder why tf no one has brought into the world. Like Jeff the Killer vs Aliens.
Settle in your chair. See the story run in your head like a movie while you write it. Have fun.
I leave here the result of this very example, you can clearly see the progression of events there.
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