I am like a child on a suger high. I have so many ideas that they all mesh together, and I can never concentrate on just one. I lack focus. More on that in a moment.

Remember when you were a youth and you fantasized all the time, occupying every moment of your day? It didn't have to make sense, it just had to be fun. For me, that never stopped. I look at things and I endlessly come up with plots and storylines and what-ifs, all screaming together. I have three monitors, simply because when on the web I can't possibly concentrate on one thing at a time. It's too boring.

I RP - that's roleplay. I 'play' with about three to four people a day, sometimes at the same time. RP in IM's involves coming up with one side of a story, and letting the other person come up with their side - usually from your respective character's point of view. Doing this, I am able to pound ideas, *original* ideas very quickly and maintain a flow that most of my RP partner's call 'amazing'. This could be a sign of vanity on my part or a lack of talent in the RPing community, I'm not sure

Yes, I can do that. Then I fail. You see, my concentration shifts so quickly that three hours later I am utterly bored with this 'great idea' that I spent all that time on. I want to start from scratch.

The same thing happens to me with short stories. Ok, the interesting idea is of three friends (fantasy era) living in an average town and having a totally average life. They are encouraged by their surrounding to take up slingshot weapons, as that is both the local sport and what the city defense uses. Blah blah, I've come up with a plot, here's the middle juicy section, ok, got me an ending, create the character's personality.. and bam, I'm ready to write.

Oh oh, but what if there were dragons? : ant pant:: Or what if one of the friends was a girl? Let's move it to a small town.. no Stephan King always does small towns.. oh oh, maybe it's on an island! Floating in the sky! Wooo! Hey, where's my coke? Do they have cokes in that time? What if they had a drink that was like coke, but was actually wine with bubbles? Isn't that champange? What do I call it? Screw it, stick with the original idea, let's get writing.

Thirty pages later I'm still thinking, so I write, and rewrite, and rewrite.. adding these new ideas. Then I get so tired and confused I just give up and start a new project.. which ends the same way.

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So question is, how the living heck do I gain some focus?

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Give up coke?

That's when craft kicks in. Are you a writer, or just someone who likes to write down their bursts of inspiration? (I'm asking the royal You, not actually you, Jake.) If you are a writer, then you know the craft takes more than just infatuation. It takes perseverance, planning, skill, and effort. It takes discipline. It takes the ability to say to your brain, "No, we're going to work on this now. Even if our mind is wandering, we're going to sit here from 4 to 6 and work. Even if what we type is crap that gets revised and deleted tomorrow, we're going to work. So get back in line, mister!"

One of the problems may be that you're trying to write your idea before it is fully formed. This OSC writing lesson touches on that:
http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/lesson18.shtml

You might be rushing into putting pen to ink, or fingers to keyboard depending on your style, too soon. Try to have some general idea of where the story is going before you start. If you do when the evil monkey robots try to intrude you can decide whether or not they fit in a medieval fantasy. I keep an idea notebook so when some really neat bit of writing, issue or idea pops into my head it has someplace to go. That way I don't feel the pressure to get it into ths story I am working on if it doesn't really fit with it.

Most good stories have more than one idea in them. You might want to stop editing as you are writing. Try to get the story down and edit out those bad robots if they don't work in the "finished" rough draft. I find that going back and editing as I go really prevents me from moving forward. Good luck.

I take about an hour a night and write down my random story ideas. I TELL what the story is about, rather than showing what the story is about.
Each night is a different concept. Each night I get the excitement of starting a concept, and the satisfaction of finishing it. I get to avoid the bother of trying to make it publishable.

I now have over 3000 of these ideas, all posted on line on various on line forums. I have all of them on, copied on several computers, but only those of just a few years ago are still on line.

In spite of this, I still get a chance to write some stories, including two novel rough drafts, though I don't usually edit them to publication levels.

The advantage of this is that you can always go back and use whatever you write. You have something to look at and something to work from. Another advantage is that you can also utterly forget the piece until it is needed. I found that writing out something like this does well to quell the rush to write the piece.

A few of the story ideas I have posted could be short stories in and of themselves if they were just cleaned up a little, while others are pathways for whole novels.

I post them on line because I don't want them to go to waste. I would love for every single one of them to be written. Of course that will never happen, at least in my life time. I also go from the belief that if twenty people wrote something from the same story idea presentation, we would have twenty different stories. I don't worry about digging into them myself.

I can just see you making faces at your computer right now, growling at the idea of cutting yourself off from the Internet. But try it. Lock yourself in a quiet room with no distractions but your non-wireless computer and your decently-thought-out plot and characters and let those characters talk to you. You may surprise yourself with how far you get in one such session. Make yourself do this each day for as long as you can. Reward yourself every so often (every few days) by taking ONE day off and messing around to your heart's content (or just take an hour off, whatever refreshes you). Then get back to the routine the next day.

Hey Lynda this from Jake's introduction:

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Oh, I have a mild version of adult ADD, people have said. So if I don't respond immediatly I'm probably staring at something shiney.

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Oh, I have a mild version of adult ADD, people have said. So if I don't respond immediatly I'm probably staring at something shiney.
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ROTFL! Yup, I can spot 'em a mile away. My father, me, our son, all ADHD. My father and I both learned how to manage it. Our son is another matter altogether. . .

BTW, how do you do quotes here? I haven't found that button yet. Thanks.

What you do, after you have the reply box on your screen, is look to the left of the box. You will see a link that says

*UBB Code is ON

and if you follow that link, it will tell you how to encase quoted words in UBB code. If I were to try to post the actual code, you wouldn't see it, you'd just see the quote bars, but I can describe it to you.

Put the word "quote" inside of straight brackets [ ] at the beginning of what you want to quote, then put the word "quote" with a / in front of it inside of another set of straight brackets at the end of what you want to quote.

In case you don't know about it, you can look at what has been posted in the topic you are replying to by going to the right on your screen and using the scroll bar to move down to a window which with its own scroll bar and shows the topic and all the posts so far. (I hope that made sense.)

Unfortunatly my usual 'quiet time' involves me driving, thinking of ideas an unable to write them down. By the way, do you have any idea how hard it is spot 'South Fifth Street' and 'J Park Place' while contemplating the reasons behind a non-sentient AI's actions (which seemed surprisingly sentient?). Hmm.. sorry, Ma'm, your pizza is stone cold because I blew a tire. Yes, I know I blew one last time I delivered to you.. back luck?

Also, to use 'quotes'...

[ quote]
Place the quotes in brackets like these, without the space. For easy review, I always put one above and below, so it's easier for me to read when I 'review' what I wrote when editing. However, that is not actually needed.
[ /quote]

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Place the quotes in brackets like these, without the space. For easy review, I always put one above and below, so it's easier for me to read when I 'review' what I wrote when editing. However, that is not actually needed.

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Unfortunatly my usual 'quiet time' involves me driving, thinking of ideas an unable to write them down.

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So.. I shall call you 'So' So, thank you for the original recorder idea. I actually plan to use that thought! Not bad! There is a bit of a drawback to that idea, however. Evidence. Sometimes I get in the mood to sing while I drive. Itsy Bitsy Spider as of late. Why? You try driving for eight hours a day, six days a week, and see what silly and whacky things you do!

Metafiction may guide your imagination into the realm where craft lies, like moving up to the next level of the game. It's very much like using more than one monitor at a time.

Warnings:
Side-effects are reliably unpredictable, even with regular use. May be addictive.

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You know what this forum needs? An ability to 'scoll up' and see what other people have written while you compose your own message. That way, people with bad memories won't forget things like how the names were spelled of the people who wrote to you.

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It takes a bit of training of the program for how you speak, but you can dictate directly into the text file while you drive. Even if you don't learn the editing commands, you can figure out what you were saying from the text it puts down. If you learn the full command structure, you can do all your computer stuff while driving.....

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Lynda, there should be something in the FAQs area that tells about this, but maybe I need to update the topics there.
What you do, after you have the reply box on your screen, is look to the left of the box. You will see a link that says

*UBB Code is ON

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Kathleen, thanks for the explanation, and the FAQ MAY be just fine! It's the eejit at the keyboard who's malfunctioning. I skimmed the FAQ when I first got here, but haven't for a while. There was, as usual, a lot to absorb, and if the UBB code stuff was there, non-techie me either missed it or skipped it or didn't "get" it - that's what we non-techies are best at! LOL! I think I have it now! Thanks again!

Lynda

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Kathleen, that is sound advice for sure. ... you arn't a sentient AI are you? Those things scare me.

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Hmm. Depends on what you mean by "artificial."

Actually, I'm someone much scarier.

I'm

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By the way, do you have any idea how hard it is spot 'South Fifth Street' and 'J Park Place' while contemplating the reasons behind a non-sentient AI's actions (which seemed surprisingly sentient?). Hmm.. sorry, Ma'm, your pizza is stone cold because I blew a tire. Yes, I know I blew one last time I delivered to you.. back luck?

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I've missed plenty of turns distracted by plotting out stories in my head, or trying to figure out some kind of something. Luckily, I have no car in Chicago, so it's much easier to either not miss a turn or realize that I missed a turn before I'm very far away. Missing an El stop because my nose is in a book, however, sometimes poses a problem.

Italo Calvino wrote _Once On A Winter Night A Traveler_ as a book that gives a book-length description of an imaginary book. Jose Luis Borges wrote mind-bending short stories about mazes and writing and meaning reflecting on itself. And of course there's the 1001 nights, the old story of Sherazade's stories that she tells to save her own life. John Barth mentioned in his _The Friday Book_ (non-fiction) that some author considered what would happen if one of her stories had been about the book of her life. It would mean an infinite regression thing, like a hall of mirrors. I know I've read at least one of Barth's novels, and can't remember the subject, but apparently they are metafiction as well.

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...an infinite regression thing, like a hall of mirrors.

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You like convoluted, spiralling, mazelike and self-referencing metafiction?

Just watch Fox News.

( Hoptoad — reaping the whirlwind )

http://www.brown.edu/Research/Decameron/
http://afdtk.uaa.alaska.edu/ect_genprol.htm

I recommend reading some history to understand the socio-political context of each - if you don't know already. It will give them more meaning than just a bunch of stories.

(And yes, classical education. History and literature.)

EDIT: (My first reaction was, "WHAT?!?! You've never heard of the Decameron??? It's one of the most fundamental written works! But I decided to take a different apporach in my post. )

Or you could look up 'classical education" in wikipedia for a light-hearted take on it.

But maybe you didn't mean anything by it and I'm just being touchy because I haven't had my coffee yet.

EDIT: I did indeed need to get some coffee and breakfast into my system. Sorry for being so quick to take offense.

I was pulling your leg.
Something evil got into me... (Note to self: design 'possessed by the devil' emoticon)