There Are No Accidents in Writing, Only Happy(ish) Mistakes
I’d forgotten how much I love writing fiction. And how much I hate it. The last time I did so was nine years ago. A short story that I shelved for one reason or another and never went back to. I remember loving the process, coming up with the characters, sitting at my computer for hours bashing a first draft out, and working at it until I had something presentable. Or at least, that was the plan at the time. Now that I’m writing again after so many years, I realized those were rose-tinted glasses. Writing is my first love, and that passion is still there. ‘Passion’ is a funny word though. It can describe anger as easily as it can joy.
Last year, after I quit my YouTube channel and games journalism, I went back to fiction, running towards it with arms open wide. I was in the honeymoon phase at first, everything clicked. I was 23 again, tapping away at my keyboard without a care in the world. The prose came easily, the dialog was buttery smooth, and I was going to write the next great novel. After some practice runs, I wrote my first short story in over a decade with the intention of selling it. Then, I started the next one, and this time, I was going to try something different.
Stories need to be outlined. That’s how it is, and I never thought I’d write any other way. It made sense. It felt right. Over the years though, I heard rumblings from dark corners of writing advice books and established authors say otherwise. Off the top, I remember hearing from George RR Martin, Meg Cabot, and, Stephen King, all ditching outlines so they can find the story in the first draft. I thought to myself, how do these people know what they’re going to write? King’s novels can be hit or miss and I’ve never read Cabot, but Martin? If he says it’s a good idea not to use an outline, well, it's gotta be a good idea.
The idea excited me. Now that I’m writing fiction again, and I’m in a good place, I figured I’d give it a try. Start writing and see where my brain takes me. No outline, and only a loose idea of character and plot.
I ended up with a 25,000 novella full of paper-thin characters, a nonsensical mystery whose culprit was obvious the second he appeared, and a plot that felt more like a rambling political manifesto than an actual story. It took about a month and a half to write, and I’ve been hacking at it for over two months trying to tame it into something presentable. This is no false creators modesty, it truly is a train wreck. Turns out I’m no George RR Martin.
I’m hesitant to share too much of what I’ve ended up with. Don’t want it breaking containment. It’s a murder mystery that I’ve had on my mind for about fifteen years. It’s set at McMurdo Station, a scientific research station in Antarctica. One of the leading scientists there was murdered, and the protagonist, a mail clerk at the station, is blamed.
A murder mystery is about the worst genre you can possibly attempt without an outline. The writer needs to know who committed the murder, why, and how before they even think about writing a single word. Murder mysteries require being written backwards, allowing the reader to pick up subtle clues along the way. Unless you write a “how catch’em” rather than a “whodunnit,” but let’s not get carried away with the mechanics here. Kojima-ing your way through, making it up as you go along, will only lead to a confusing and unsatisfying mystery. That’s made worse, somewhat surprisingly, when you don’t know anything about the setting or how it works.
I had to spend a few weeks researching how a scenario like that might play out. While someone has died at McMurdo before, it was from a fire caused by a mechanical fault. No one has ever been assaulted at the station, much less murdered. On paper, the United States Marshals have jurisdiction there, and there are two Marshals stationed at the base at all times. But US Marshals are not detectives, their job is normally to apprehend fugitives and transport them. What would they do in the event of an obvious murder? Would police officers or FBI agents be sent? From where? How many agents would go? How long would it take for them to get there?
When I figured that out (by which I mean having to take a few educated guesses, because again, it’s never happened before) I then had to research how McMurdo Station actually works. What kind of science do they do there? How do they do it? How does the chain of command work? What are the support staff usually up to? How many people are stationed there? How does the climate change over the seasons?
My story was set in a dystopian future, so I had some room to fudge things, but I wanted it to be as accurate as possible. Or at least feel accurate. I have been applying to various jobs at McMurdo—cook, mail clerk, janitor, repairman—for all fifteen of those years this idea has been kicking in my head. I’ve never gotten the chance; please, shed a tear for me. These jobs attract a lot of applicants, now more than ever. Ah well, no firsthand experience for me. Queue a dozen or so YouTube videos by those lucky few that do have jobs there, some old blog posts, and articles about the station written over the decades.
Then there’s the protagonist. With no outlines, I was feeling frisky, and thought “what if our detective wasn’t a detective? Why would a non-detective try to solve the case? Because she’s the one suspected of it!” Brilliant idea, Josh, truly. I see no problems with that idea whatsoever, except all those very obvious problems. How was she going to investigate a murder when she has no idea what she’s doing? How was she going to do that while under suspicion of the two Marshals already there and everyone else at the base?
This part was a surprisingly easy problem to solve – a solution I won’t share because that’s something I’m keeping in my pocket for a future story. But the solution created more problems than it solved. It amounts to a vast conspiracy that required miles of set up, and this needing to be a short story meant I didn’t have enough of a runway. Most of that 25,000 word count is devoted to establishing the world and the conspiracy, and as a result, the ending jump-scares you as soon as that set up is complete. There was no room to let it simmer, no chance for characters to do anything, much less anything interesting.
I’m sure a better writer could work around these limitations and make a killer (ha!) story. For a hack like me, it proved impossible. What I’ve done is impressive, in a way. I picked the worst story idea possible to forsake my outlining and planning mentality. It sounds ridiculous now, but I didn’t think it would be a problem. I was riding high after my first short story and the start of this blog (which I began at around the same time I started writing this story). I felt invisible. Maybe this story is what I needed to pull me back to reality. Even the best writers end up with a dud every now and then, and I’m far from the best at anything.
This is the joy of writing, though. When life gives you lemons, make cliches. There are plenty of elements I can cannibalize from this story to use in future work. The conspiracy I came up with ain’t too shabby, if I do say so myself. While the characters are pretty much nothing, the protagonist has potential. The world I crafted is pretty good, and I’ve got all that research knowledge about how McMurdo works, too. That’s definitely getting used for something. Oh, and I know to stick with my outlining methods. I know how to better write a murder mystery, or at least how not to write one.
I’m also proud of myself for (finally) deciding to scrap it, rather than hack away at it for many months more until I shove it out the door regardless of quality. That was always a big problem with my YouTube channel. I'd spend so much time on a dud, but my god is sunk cost fallacy, so I couldn't let that time go to waste. I'd spend days, weeks, or even months brutalizing a video until I got tired and shoved it out the door regardless of quality.
This is also the pain of writing. Advice is not universal. What works for one person won’t necessarily work for someone else. The no-outline method might work for George RR Martin, but it also might not. He’s infamously been writing The Winds of Winter for 15 years, with no publication date in sight. I like planning my stories in advance, but the aspiring writer reading this might find that such pre-planning only bogs them down. You can spend months or years editing draft after draft, or you can keep the editing process to a minimum, like I prefer. The only way you're going to find what works for you is by doing it yourself.
Nobody needs writing advice from me, but if I can offer up one nugget I've learned through years of banging my head against the proverbial wall, it’s this: if you know something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to ditch it. It’s a delicate balancing act. You can’t give up the second you run into trouble, or even at second two. You’re never going to strike gold the second you put ink to paper. Or, pixel to blank document. But you also don’t want to keep editing and tweaking day after day to the point where the story is unrecognizable to what you originally set out to write.
That’s as far as my advice go. I’ve yet to find the perfect formula for when you should ditch a story or when you should give it one more try. As I said, I spent months on this story that was doomed from the start. I guess its easier to give advice than it is to take it.
Now, you’re probably tired of me yapping about this story without sharing any of it. I’m reluctant to do so, though clearly not enough to not. Here is a small snippet from the original draft that I think highlights some of what worked and what mostly didn’t. This is an exchange between Chelsi and Cam, a shady character who works in one of the science labs.
The packages piled up. It was an average haul. The mail came a couple of times a week these days, so there was rarely a heavy day. Seven or eight boxes here and there, a care package or two. And, as usual, there was one lone letter, from Rachael. She held the letter and thought of writing to Jerold, but he’d just call back and ask why she was wasting her time.
“You gotta hold it closer to the light,” she heard from behind her.
Embarrassed, she spun around to see Cam standing there, staring at her.
“I weren’t trying to read it,” she said, throwing the letter into her cart.
“Uh huh,” Cam laughed. “I get anything?”
“You ain’t got no girl back home, what do you think?” she laughed back.
“Maybe next time,” he shrugged. “You talk to Hudson?”
Cam worked in the biology department, studying some kind of micro-plankton. Chelsi was interested in the work, broadly speaking, but once Cam started going on about the details her mind started to wonder. Like her, he seemed to know everyone in the station, and had an uncanny ability to know where they were, too.
“You know I did.”
“Yeah, you two were on your meet cute. Adorable, by the way.” He sat down on the table by the door. “Cold out there, ain’t it?”
“Not really,” she said, thinking back to the bare patches of mud and even green shoots of grass outside the lab.
“Bad answer. You know what he wants to hear,” he said, pointing at the portrait of President Tragin that adorned the room. “You don’t make it to four terms without hearing what you want to hear.”
No, I will no provide context for what they’re talking about at the end. Cam is so shady it’s obvious he isn’t the killer, and equally obvious that he’s up to something. And yes, I named the shady guy after my dog. I was focusing on the idea of a corrupt president of the US who’s broken the system so thoroughly he’s basically King for life. Not sure where the inspiration for that came from. Also, I wrote this in late November, so I can’t remember if it’s supposed to say “I weren’t trying to read it” or if that’s a typo.
You can see why not having detailed character profiles and a clear plan was a mistake.
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