I’m excited to be starting the fiction unit—fiction is where my focus is, and where I hope to get the most “return on investment” for this class, so to speak. When I was younger I used to roleplay on internet forums and internet relay chat; I’d still be doing that, except it seems to be generally much harder to find people willing to deal with the concept of a forum these days. Maybe I’m just too nostalgic, but the asynchronous nature of posting a thread and replying maybe a couple times a week to collaborate on a story was a lot of fun.
There is one thing that makes my fiction writing a little bit strange: It’s almost all xenofiction. In the past, I roleplayed Pokemon; not the Humans that trained them, but the Pokemon themselves. When I think about stories that I want to write today, as well as stories I have started writing (and the odd finished story here and there), they’re all centered around non-Human characters. That’s not to say there are no Humans in my writing, they’re just relegated to secondary and background roles.
When it comes to writing fiction, my major struggle is drawing out material into anything with length; when I think of a “chapter” in a story, I imagine a collection of related scenes that collectively move a story forward. When I start writing, I have a very tight idea of what needs to happen to take the story from start to finish; it’s the difference between “Joey took a walk through the woods to visit his friend Jamie,” and “Joey took a walk through the woods; along the way he found a stick that seemed to fit in his hand just perfectly. As he walked, he swung it like a sword, imagining he was carving a path through a dense jungle to rendezvous with his friend Jamie.” The example is short, but I think it conveys what I mean—there’s no reason we couldn’t move on with the story, ignoring Joey’s walk through the forest to get to the meat of what he’s going to do with Jamie. In this example, the extra details of Joey’s walk are irrelevant; I’d hope to make the stick or the portrayal of his imagination more substantial in terms of the whole story, if I were writing an actual story, but it’s difficult when I just want to get through the scenes I think are most important.