This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. You can find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
Welcome to Story Over Everything, Episode 24, which will be aired June 23rd, 2023.
This episode I'm continuing to document, chronicle my journey as a writer.
I'm going to be talking about partly, and this is because I don't know everything I'm going to be talking about yet,
so for sure I'm going to be at least a little bit talking about some insights I've had into writing process and craft,
including or based on a book, audiobook I bought.
And I almost let myself get upsold on something and I'm not saying I shouldn't have or that it was the wrong decision,
but between listening to that, you know, craft book or, you know, the author blueprint from Joanna Penn last week
and buying the English, which was free, and then buying this book, I bought the packaged up audiobook and an e-book
and I think it was only a two hour read or something like that, but it wasn't that much money for the pair of them, which was good.
I feel a lot more inspired to, you know, keep pushing myself to write.
You know, I have already determined that I want to do this, you know, 10 minute goal of writing every day or a goal of writing at least 10 minutes every day.
And if I go beyond that 10, that's fine.
This morning I had to do something super early for work and I got up in the middle of the night
and I wasn't able to go to sleep very easily partly because of a situation that I had to deal with
and partly because of stupidity on my own part.
I was foolish and I got this new thing and I was trying to configure it and get it all set up and ready to go to maximize my...
I honestly think I will become more productive with this thing, but it did slow me down in the middle of the night
and it wasted time and it kept me up later or it took... it stole sleep for me basically doing this, spending time on this stole sleep for me,
which meant I was super tired, which meant I chose to wake up later than typical the Monday and Sunday that I worked consecutively and...
not concisely, but, you know, in a dedicated fashion.
I had gotten up early both those days and I made sure I drew and wrote first thing in the morning.
This day I did not... I also exercised those days first thing in the morning or first thing in the morning.
Today I did not exercise. So, anyway, I kind of want to hone and get my body just right and properly dialed in to help my mind
because, you know, your mind is actually attached to your body. I don't know if you know that or not.
So as I think about this more and more, I want to keep up with the writing every day a certain amount of time.
However, beyond that, I want to... and the hope is that... the plan is that as I'm exercising my writing muscles more consistently,
five, six days a week, maybe seven, who knows, I will cultivate a discipline and basically turn myself into a sprinty, spurt rider
who's able to get out... who's able to write like a dwarf runs, you know, being a natural sprinter and whatnot.
But I don't know that that's possible. Or no, I do know that that's possible. I do think it is likely.
However, and this is where the negativity was coming in, however, I do not think ten minutes a day writing,
no matter how fast I get, no matter what my, you know, words per second is or whatever you want to call that.
Words per minute, I guess, would be the right way to put it.
I do not think that will be sufficient for me to continue to write books at a reasonable pace,
especially because after I write them, I need to have them edited.
I need to do all the different things that you do with a book before you get it printed.
And since I'm self-publishing and things like that, I'm teaching myself a lot of those things or hiring people out or other things.
And I, you know, I need to get the best ROI I can. So that's interesting.
And that's interesting to me. And the author that I got this from is M.L.
I cannot remember his last name right now. Hold on.
Okay, I got it. It's M.L. Ron. So I, you know, if you listen to the last episode of Story Over Everything,
you know that I'm in some ways facing a crisis where I don't feel like I have the fundamentals down.
So I've been doing a lot of research. I've been doing a lot of listening to stuff
and trying to figure out what I want my method to be.
And that way I can get it codified and then proceed to go back to that until I have it memorized.
And even before I have it completely memorized, keep it in a document in a useful, friendly,
you know, simply displayed way and maybe even have, you know, the base document for it
and then make copies off of that and work off of that and expound and expand
so that I can basically get myself to the point where I'm writing in this, you know, mechanistic way,
which I still think can be creative and worthwhile. And if you don't think so, whatever.
But if you want to give it a shot, I think it makes sense. But anyway,
but something struck me. So this M.L. Ron book, it's called Be a Writing Machine,
which I thought, well, that's the perfect book for me. That's exactly what I mean.
I'd like to be a writing machine. And I think that's pretty great.
So he just talks about like theory and process and what do you think stops people from writing
as much as they possibly could and advice he has for you to push yourself to write more.
And it's funny. He's a pantser. And one of the things he says is quit drafting or not quit.
Well, yes, quit drafting, do one draft and also quit outlining.
So that's not what I want to do. I guess I sort of kind of want to use the snowflake method
and build up from a single sentence to like a larger treatment and then make a skeleton or outline from that
and then develop that farther, further, further. Yes, further.
Anyway, further has two degree, farther has two distance, right?
Anyway, so that's my plan. And anyway, I as part of that strategy to figure out what I am doing
and what my methodology will be as an author, I decided to buy this book and listen to his advice
and what he has to say about being a writing machine. And because that's my goal.
And I guess to sum up what I was saying or to put a fine point on it, my goal is to be a writing machine.
I think I'm going to spend, I was at the gas pump thinking about this.
Right now, I'm only three days into writing every day, 10 minutes a day.
I want to do that for a month, build and entrench that habit in myself.
And then after that, I think I want to increase my time.
Well, I want to increase my writing in one of two ways.
I will continue to track my daily writing and write or put the word count in my log
in the weekly roundup post that you can find on the website, mjmunoz.com.
And I will continue to do that. I will either increase my time or set a goal of a number of words
I'd like to put out each day. Now, honestly, saying that out loud, what is my daily word count that I want to achieve?
I don't like the sound of that. That doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel appealing.
It doesn't feel like me. However, if I do want to be a writing machine, you know, it's junk in junk out, right?
So, well, and that's kind of my point. If it's junk in junk out and I'm just looking for a word count each day,
then is that setting me up for failure? Because will I be inflating my words?
Will I be throwing in unnecessary things just to pad out the word count?
Or will I actually write something meaningful in that time?
And is the goal for me to write a certain amount of words?
Or is the goal for me to write a certain amount of words that I'm going to keep?
Now, Ron speaks of writing in a tidy manner so that your writing is not sloppy
and in need of excessive revision so that you're not going in there and doing two and three drafts or four even.
And I can see a quality in that. I can see that being a very strong idea, a strong premise.
And ideally, your first draft would always be great. How do you form a good first draft?
Is it by setting a word count for yourself and making sure you hit that every day?
Or is it by setting a quality time writing interval or period for yourself and hitting that every day?
I would think it's more that. But that's also why I'm not going to switch automatically to targeting a word count.
I will make an adjustment at the end of, let's say, 30 days of writing like this and see how I want to change things.
Do I want to bump it up? Do I want to say, okay, I'm going to write 500 words a day and maybe time myself and see,
well, how long does it take to do 500 words? Sometimes it's 10 minutes, which would be awesome.
Sometimes it's an hour, which would be okay, I guess.
You know, I did the math. I am interested in pulp novels. And he brought up this phrase, which I love.
It's basically, if you want to manage it, you must measure it.
He actually said it differently, but that's basically a truth of this world.
And I like that because it makes sense. Anything you want to measure the status of,
you will be able to, with those metrics, develop a plan to manipulate it so that you get the kinds of results that you want.
What are the results I want? Do I want to write six to eight books a year? I don't know.
I don't necessarily think so. Would that be good? Perhaps.
You know, a book a month is a crazy schedule. I devoured nine books from an author within like,
I don't know, less than two months because I had the means, motive, and opportunity.
And would I be happy with a writer or a reader of mine doing that? Yes.
I did see, while I enjoyed the books overall, these are Jeffrey A. Haskell's Arsenal series,
Full Metal Superhero Arsenal. I did notice some weird patterns and some weird inconsistencies or little flaws.
And I don't know if that's attributed to how quickly he wrote the books or if it was an editing,
you know, an error in editing and how they were put together.
They're still very good books. Like, I think the lowest I would rate any of them is like a seven out of ten.
But, you know, the highest. But that's because I'm really hyper-focused on the content.
I don't care if you, you know, I don't really care about the typos and such.
It's not, professional is not as professional as it could be, but I didn't read it. I listened to them.
So I experienced the story in a different way. And when I looked at Amazon reviews,
there were people complaining about typos and whatnot.
But as far as, you know, listening to the story, there were no issues in grammar or syntax or anything that I heard.
There were just like weird bits where like things would be repeated in an odd way or there would be a little bit of a jump in logic or a gap.
Almost as if there was, you know, almost as if it was, you know, point A, B, C, D, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, Q.
Well, where is P in the other letter? You know, what happened there? I don't exactly know.
But that's not my problem. That's Haskell's problem, not mine. And I still enjoyed the stories.
So it's not like, you know, it gutted me or anything like that.
But I'm thinking, how do I avoid those types of mistakes?
I don't know, but I'm not even producing books at all at this point.
So I'm not going to let that worry me. I'm just saying I don't know for me,
you know, what the ideal cadence of releases of books is.
And I guess that's something I'll figure out later, although, but I will tell you, you know,
between 150 and 200 words a day, over 10 minutes is not good enough for me.
So after this month, I want to switch it up and see, you know, will I go 20 minutes or will I go for a certain word count?
And I was going to say I looked it up.
And if I want to create a pulp novel in, let's say, 40 hours of work writing, I would have to write 1500 words an hour,
which doesn't seem like a ridiculous amount if you divide that into blocks of 15 minute periods,
375 words every 15 minutes.
I could write a pulp novel within 40 hours.
But if I only wrote 15 minutes a day and let's say I only wrote five days a week,
that's 75 minutes and 40 hours divided by 75 minutes equals, hold on, that doesn't work.
What am I doing here? Let me think about this.
40 hours times 60 minutes is the number 240.
If I divide that by 15 minutes, that's 160 days of writing.
That's a third of a year, maybe minus 365, 205.
So let's say 365 divided by 3 is 120 days.
So it would take me over a third of a year to write a single pulp novel.
That's not good enough for me. That's not what I want to do.
I want to write pulp novels based on the things that I enjoy.
That seems like my preferred genre.
And that's what I want to write in.
But Walter B. Gibson was writing one or two 60,000 word novels a month.
And I'm not saying I want to get to that point because that's 24 books a year,
which is crazy. But I want to be somewhere closer to that.
So maybe my goal would be to write maybe six books a year,
which would be one every two months.
And I have to figure out what that would mean for me to write every day
and then include editing, revision and all that stuff too to figure out how I can achieve that.
So I guess to summarize that my biggest takeaway from Ron is that by setting a goal for myself,
I'll have something to strive towards.
Even if I don't hit it, it's better than not because the way I'm operating right now,
I'm despite the fact that I'm not a pants or rider,
I'm running my writing operation by the seat of my pants.
And that doesn't make sense.
It doesn't seem to be working for me because I haven't had success yet.
I have not formed a business plan for myself.
I have ideas, but they need to be formalized and set in stone basically.
So that's something I definitely want to do.
And yeah, I like a lot of what Penn is doing with the self-hosting.
You know, she's got her own page, creativepenbooks.com.
Check that out. That's her storefront where you can buy directly from her.
I think that's great. I want to do that too.
In fact, I bought ML Ron's book from him specifically on his website, Author Level Up.
And which by the way, if you get any sales from this Ron,
you want to toss me an affiliate, a couple bucks.
I wouldn't mind.
But anyway, there was an option to buy directly from him as opposed to Amazon.
So I bought directly from him because I want to be paid directly from my customers.
So therefore I want to be a customer who pays directly money to authors for stuff that I want from them.
So anyway, that was really a cool experience.
I see that he used HitPay. This is not an endorsement.
It's just an observation.
I've heard of HitPay before and he used it and it seemed like a good, a pretty good system.
It's it kind of seems like an alternative to book funnel because again,
I'm a join a pan listener and I believe on CreativePen,
she just had this week of June, whatever this is like the 22nd 21st or second one of those days.
Anyway, she just had on Damon something from book funnel.
And it sounds like the way that book funnel does things where they can get your books distributed to your people who sign up to your stuff.
Maybe even do a little bit of well, yeah, that part.
I don't really know because I paid through HitPay and then HitPay sent me an email and in that email,
there was my digital or my ebook and my audiobook and it was cool because there was a pop-up on the website of the desktop that I did it on originally.
And he said, you want to download this here? And I elected to not.
And it said, don't worry.
Or basically, it said, don't worry.
We emailed this to you too.
So, you know, you can go and close this and go away.
You'll get it in your inbox.
I looked sure enough. My phone indicated that I had something in my inbox.
I swiped down and I saw, oh, okay, cool.
This is this is them.
This is from HitPay and this is my book.
And then I, you know, that a couple seconds later, I went ahead and I downloaded the audiobook on my phone.
I downloaded the ebook on my phone.
It was super easy, barely any inconvenience.
And it was great.
So I don't know if Book Funnel does all of that as well.
But that's really cool that we're in a environment now.
We're in a marketplace or ecosystem where you can get a system like that to do that for you.
And, you know, Michael, ML Run, put out videos on YouTube that I went to and I checked them out.
I like his personality. I liked his approach.
I like the fact that he's written 40 books.
That's amazing. Since I can't remember what he said.
Maybe 2008 or something like that.
He started writing seriously.
I kind of think that's right. Anyway, doesn't matter.
It's his story, not mine. But I'm just telling you, he's written 40 books in not a lot of time.
And he's writing, I don't know, I think he said he averages eight books a year now and he thinks he's going to get faster than that.
And, well, I appreciate that.
And I think that's cool.
And that's just that's crazy inspiring.
But regardless, he did what, you know, in his video presentation, he at the end did a call to action and he pitched,
Hey, I've got these links to these courses or, you know, the other people have done that I've taken to and you benefit from them.
And, you know, I wrote this book, I wrote this book, I wrote this book.
And you might want to check that out if you're interested in this.
If you've clicked on this video, I know you're interested in this topic.
And since you did that, I think you'll be interested in this book I wrote.
And again, like I said earlier, the title of the book intrigued me.
It caught my attention. I thought, all right, I got to do this.
And it was cool. I mentioned Pope authors earlier at the end of the audio book.
He mentions books he recommends people read.
And one of them was a book about writing pulp stories.
I want to say pulp fiction, but I don't want to get messed up with the movie.
And I think I might have to buy that. I might.
We'll see. So I already found it in Amazon and I'm looking forward to that.
Looking forward to getting into that. But I know.
And this is really cool. In one of his videos, he was like, look,
I got advice for you and I got it to read from the school hard knocks.
I'm going to tell you stuff that you need to hear.
But, you know, will you hear it? I don't know.
That's up to you. And no matter how like I can't give you a magic bullet
because you can only employ, you know, the magic bullet is you making yourself
do the work and you being disciplined, which
general that very much meshes with what I believe and where I'm at now in my life.
I feel like just taking responsibility for everything I do, everything I failed to do,
every mistake that happens, not in a, you know, oh, I'm suffering and woe is me kind of way,
but just like, yep, I let that happen. I let that happen.
I made that happen. I'm responsible.
I shouldn't have done that or I should have done this to make sure that things stayed in good standing
or whatever the situation is. So I'm very content with that feeling in life
and the attitude in life. And yeah, you know, he was right.
I, you know, I haven't published my books yet because of me.
It's all my fault. It has nothing to do with anybody else.
And I could have done it if I wanted to. And I'm tired of that being the case.
I want to get myself to the point where I'm really doing this.
So anyway, I'm going to wrap up the Grow Bug Tales project and then I might take time off of.
Yeah, I don't know how I'm going to do it. I was going to say I might take time off of my creative writing
in order to give myself a little bit of, no, I think I will.
I'll take a small break, like less than a month, and in that month, I will dedicate myself to honing my craft
and figuring out this formula that I want for my, I don't know if I want to say mechanical writing
or like systemic writing. I'm going to come up with a cool name for it as part of the project.
But basically, I'm going to come up with the method first, then come up with the name for it afterwards,
I think. And I don't want to be one of these product guys, but I think I'll definitely include on my website
links for people, PDFs for people, where they can have their information so they can fill it out
and have the kind of guide that I want. And the reason I'm making it is because it's the guide I want.
And if other people like it, then that's great. And, you know, I'll have it for them.
So I'll have for them, but more importantly, I'll have it for me too.
So I'll be able to reference it very quickly and use it to great effect.
And yeah, that's that's part of what I'm doing. And that's part of my strategy.
And I want to, you know, be salesy in the same way, which is, hey, I know you're here doing this for this reason.
And, you know, I have, you know, we have an overlapping interest and I have a thing that you might be,
you know, benefited from by checking it out. You know, go here and do that and, you know,
hopefully expand my base. I don't want to attract authors necessarily who, you know, want advice and help,
because again, I'm not that kind of person. I'm not that teacher, I don't think.
That's not my intention to be that. I want to be the bookseller, the, you know, superhero,
you know, Tokusatsu, Henshin hero type, you know, superhero story selling guy.
That's my goal. I want to write that stuff. And, you know, I will do that.
But again, you know, with these children's stories, I'm cutting my teeth on and this has been my plan all along.
It just, it's taking a lot longer than I thought it was going to be. I thought I'd publish in 2022,
but that did not happen. And now we're in the middle of 2023 and it hasn't happened yet.
But I have a feeling I have every intention to make it happen this year.
So anyway, you know, that's the author I want to be and I'm figuring out how to work towards that.
And I want to have concrete results and things that are clear and easy for, you know,
me to read, for me to share, for me to say that this is who I am. This is where I am now.
And I'm going to just keep plugging away at it and working towards that goal,
making it happen and putting up the proof here in the story over everything and all over mjwinners.com as well.
So I'm going to take a break and come back with either a conclusion or more thoughts and more concrete stuff.
I want to follow up on something from last time. I found my Everything Creative Writing book and I looked it over.
I didn't read it specifically, but I found out I think what the most pertinent sections are going to be for me to look into.
And I thought I remembered getting the format for the outline from that book.
However, I it seems like I did not, unless I need to look much more carefully at it in order to discover that,
because in my first perusal of it just last week, I did not see it, which has led me to look for resources kind of all over the place.
I kind of want to keep skimming Readsie for resources because they have good stuff there.
I think they have nice forms and I've modified some of them myself, downloaded them,
copy and pasted and modified to make like my templates because templates make sense to me.
And anyway, I got something from them on the three act structure and I started going through these videos by Lee McGeorge.
Lee McGeorge is a indie horror author and he wrote something called The Obsidian,
which is a gothic romance book with a ghost train, which is pretty cool and the ghost train is the obsidian.
And he's got this right, a novel course on YouTube and it's, I don't know, 26 videos long or something like that.
And in it, he basically takes himself through the process of well,
he gives instruction and comes up with the idea for this book.
And then I looked it up to see, well, this sounds like it would be a really cool book or novella first of all,
because it's a short one, it's a novella.
And I thought it'd be cool to see if he published this and I would also like to read this if he published it to see how good it is,
to see whether or not I should, you know, hitch myself to his wagon or not.
And I did find it. It's on KPU, it's on Kindle Unlimited, whatever that's called.
And it's a two and a half hour read. I desperately tried to see if there was a audiobook version of it.
If I want to do my EV app trick in order to get it to be turned into an audiobook for me,
I would have to copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste.
It doesn't work on the desktop. It works on the phone.
So I don't know that it would be worthwhile to try to do it on the phone,
because it might take me two and a half hours to copy and paste it.
Of course, then I could listen to it anytime I want, anywhere I want while I'm doing other stuff.
But could I just read it in snatches instead? I don't know.
But he talked about the eight point story structure, which I've heard of.
I never really examined too much, although it's funny.
It kind of shares some features with the 3X structure as far as they're being a as far as I can remember,
because there is a status quo, then there's a trigger, which is a term I'm very familiar with as far as writing is concerned.
Then things get more difficult. Eventually there's a climax, then you come down from that climax.
But apparently in the eight point story structure, it's climax reversal, then I don't know, wrap up, ending.
I can't remember what they call it. I don't have it memorized yet, but it sounds like a really good method.
And hearing him go through it is he's basically streaming.
It's like stream of consciousness. He's just recording himself doing this stuff.
He where he ends up writing for a while, he ends up doing fast forwarding, which is cool.
But you can still see the passage of time there.
It seems like a really neat, really concise way to go about it.
I wouldn't say he uses the snowflake method.
He kind of does like a brainstorm thing in the beginning of it.
But he like threw out ideas. It's a really cool thing.
You should check it out. Lee McGeorge. I don't know what else.
Like write your novel course or something like that. It's how you'll probably find it.
I don't even know what the name of his YouTube channel. I just know that his name is Lee.
George. Oh shoot. It is McGeorge, right?
Hold on. I'm pretty, pretty sure it's Lee McGeorge.
So, yes, it is Lee McGeorge. Anyway, you'll be able to find it.
I can provide a link to India in the show notes as well or in the blog post that I turned this into.
So, yeah, it's a very interesting idea.
I really appreciate that he documented his process like that.
And I'm about half way, I don't know, I'm halfway, two thirds through.
And it's really interesting to see how it's developing. I'm going to definitely finish the rest of the course.
And I'm sure, I mean, I've already learned some stuff from it.
I think I will continue to learn more and I find it pretty compelling.
And I'm kind of thinking, like I was saying with ML Ron's method too,
I think I kind of want to combine some of these things together.
Like I think I want a, because I won't go into it, but McGeorge does this thing where he
kind of like goes back and like fills in the gaps.
Like he creates, he like brainstorms an idea and starts filling that out.
But as he's kind of going through the process and like reiterating it for himself to more fully fill it out,
he goes back and, okay, now I've got, you know, six characters.
These are the people they are.
And I'm just going to give a, I'm going to give them a name and a brief description.
And like characterize them and describe their character as well.
So I guess he's saying characterizes how people view them and their character is who they truly are underneath that
when they're put to pressure or friction.
So under normal circumstances in their status quo, they seem this way because partly it's true.
That's what's observable of them by other people.
But then when the chips are down, how do they react?
Well, they come out of that, that characterization and their true character is revealed because as I've said before,
conflict reveals character, right?
So anyway, I don't know if I'm going to assemble like a bunch of maxims or whatever.
They're going to help guide me through writing my stories.
But I mean, it feels good.
It makes sense.
You should be able to have protocols and principles that you can rely on in order to generate story.
That just makes sense to me anyway.
So I like that.
But I think I kind of want to start off like with the idea that I have to, you know,
maybe maybe throw brainstorm type stuff out there for that, especially with like the pulpy things I want to write.
It makes sense to bring together the diverse elements that I want for a particular story and then develop those.
And I think, though, I want to do, you know, put my ideas down and then say, OK, so I have my ideas now.
Here is my one sentence summary of the story.
And then from there, you know, and I can use that for my blurb and other things going down the line, right?
And then from there, I think I want to, I don't know, maybe use the eight point structure to kind of help me figure out what exactly is going on to help me figure out, OK, who is my cast and.
What is the setting? And.
What is the character and characterization of each of my cast members so that I can have top from the top down in my my document from developing to writing the novel?
Maybe I'll have the development document be one thing, like I said before, then a first draft, then a final manuscript type document.
So three children. I think I mentioned the last story of everything that seems to make sense to me to keep things organized.
But then I'll be able to reference that in that document and see, OK, what is the character ization and what is the character?
And then also, what are the demographic qualities?
What's the description of the physicality of the character?
And I can just do a couple of things there and then.
That'll help guide me through. And then I think I'd like to add in there as well.
What is the motivation goal and conflict for each character?
And I think I would put that up in the top with their description, you know, like within the cast area, I'll have basically a cheat sheet or a condensed bio for the character along with their, you know,
or within their cast listener in the place where I list them, where I list the cast members.
I'm I don't know why I'm struggling to say that more clearly, but that's that's the final thing I wanted to say about that.
And then under that, I can have, you know, like I said, motivation, goal, conflict and theme.
And maybe the theme goes up top under the one sentence thing and or maybe the theme is derived directly from the main character, the perspective character of their by.
Maybe it goes in their bio because they know they want to keep it separate.
I think I'll do the ideas and then I'll maybe throw those at the bottom of something, but keep it up in that document.
Maybe that'll be like, I don't know, my my foundation is that and I'll have that cast at the very bottom.
And I'm building the story I can have at the pinnacle is the one sentence condensation of the one sentence condensed form of the story.
Then I can have the blurb that I can have the theme defined, then I can have my cast, my setting, my.
I'm not sure what else I need. Then after that, I guess I would have my story treatment.
That's a couple of pages long or, you know, it's you expand upon the the eight plot points of the eight story points by I think doing one paragraph for each of them.
I think that sounds right. Maybe two paragraphs for each of them, which if that's eight to sixteen paragraphs, I would imagine that'd be a page and a half to two pages.
And maybe in addition to the cast, because I'm writing these sci fi superhero type stories for when I am, maybe I also need to have like a props section as well.
And kind of treat it like a like a play or movie or a comic book or something.
That would make sense. So anyway, I'm glad I made these notes.
I was thinking about not doing it, but then I listened to a document that I again made and I listened to with Evie before I came back to the recording.
And it got me thinking about the three act or the eight point story thing.
And I want to look at the three act structure documents that I have now and then also look at the the blending of the you can harmonize apparently the three act structure with the eight point story structure.
And that seems like it might be the best thing to do, especially because supposedly the eight point story structure might be more difficult to use as a full novel versus like a short story or novella.
And apparently, according to the same resource, which I will name later and link to the three act structure is better at helping you build out your middle so that you don't struggle with that.
So it's kind of like when if you blend the two together, the eight point and three act, it they help to compensate for each other's weaknesses, which I think is good because then it more easily helps develop that structure.
You know, basically, I think if that's true, that they harmonize with each other and fill in each other's weaknesses, and that means that I'm going to have an overall stronger method that I'm working off of in order to get that to all work well.
And then I think I can kind of incorporate what Imran is saying and try not to do multiple drafts, because if I have this, you know, I don't know, mini draft type thing or no, if I have this like really robust outline, because again, I feel more comfortable with that.
And it helps to direct me and tells me everything I need to know about my story.
Then once I have that down, I can just start filling those things in.
And it seems to be logical to me. And again, if you know, once I've done this one time, the next time I do it, I can just keep iterating on it and changing it up until I get it so that it serves me as well as it needs to as well as it can so that I have the best performance I can have with my writing.
That's the plan anyway.
So you'll have to go look at the show notes, you know, show notes slash blog entry for this episode of story over everything to see the links at the bottom.
But I found more links, more interesting information, more like, you know, colder, clinical, simpler.
Presentations of the information on the eight point story arc, which I now am confident to say that's what it is, the eight point story arc.
And, yeah, it can, you know, relatively simply be used for creating just about any story.
And I find that really interesting. Before I found this latest document.
Oh, which, again, will be linked at the bottom here.
I was thinking about it and I was thinking, is it possible to use the eight point story arc or the eight point arc for every scene or every chapter?
And I realized that, yes, yes, it is. Or at least, again, from my understanding, as I'm trying to wrap my head around this, it sure seems like you can.
And part of why I feel so confident about that is because one of the sites that I've linked here,
it mentions the fact that you can even make the single sentence of your story, which I don't know what you call that.
The log line is something else, but I don't know what you call that one line summary of your story.
That can be comprised of the eight point arc because it has all those elements.
It's got the stasis and the trigger, you know, goes to the climax, the reversal, finally the resolution.
And I skipped a couple there because I don't have them all memorized yet.
But that was super interesting to me that the single sentence, you can use the eight point arc to construct a sentence that has everything.
So, I don't know, does that mean that the least amount of words you can have in one of those that fulfills that, that fulfills that purpose would be like nine words?
I'm thinking, you know, the or uh, or something like that. You wouldn't say man on mission of revenge.
You'd say a man on a mission for revenge. Yada yada.
A man loses his family. A man has the perfect life with his family until they are gunned down, caught in the crossfire between rival gangs.
Now he seeks to get vengeance on the criminals who took his wife and son from him.
Will he succeed in this mission? Or will they kill him? And even if he does live, will he lose his soul?
Something like that. I think that kind of fulfills everything. That's Frank Castle by the way, or at least the movie version of Frank Castle.
The first one, the good one. I didn't see the second one. I don't know if it's bad or not.
But the Frank Castle Punisher movie from, I don't know, early 2000s or late, no, it would have been early 2000s.
It was like post Blade and for sure post Blade and maybe post Spider-Man 1.
So maybe 2001 or 2002 it came out. Man, I love that movie.
Anyway, John Travolta is in it. I think, I can't remember the actor's name who plays Frank Castle, but it was a great movie.
Anyway, but like that basically, you know, it was a kind of long sentence I think.
But it still fulfills more or less going off the top of my head not being able to look at it and think about each element by itself.
But it was way more than nine or ten words. It was probably like a 40 word sentence.
Which I don't know if there's a conventional wisdom on how many words you should have as your maximum sentence length, but I don't really care.
Anyway, so I like that and I like that knowing this.
I like I'm not saying that eight point arc is the only way to write a story.
I'm just saying I think it's a good way that appeals to me.
And already considering the fact that I had wanted to use this single sentence structure to expand and expand and expand my story, then it totally makes sense.
I can do that. And also the flexibility of the eight point arc, meaning that you can have your chapters broken down in eight point arcs as well.
Or I don't know if it's chapters or scenes and I don't know what the distinction is.
How many scenes can you have in a chapter before it's too many and you need to move on?
I love The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Those chapters are too long.
They are too. They're an hour long on average, I believe, which is unbelievable.
Anyway, anyway, yeah, they're comprised of many, many scenes.
So how many scenes? I don't know. Michael Crichton.
I've read a fair number of his books, like a half dozen or something. And oh gosh.
Okay. Timeline Jurassic Park 1 and 2 or Jurassic Park in the Lost World and The Andromeda String.
That was a cool book. I guess only four Crichton books.
Maybe there was a fifth one in there somewhere, but no, it was just this far. Never mind.
But still, that's a handful.
He writes very short chapters. It's very suspenseful, very pithy, very effective, I would say.
Although he does let... I'm not going to talk about Ian Malcolm and his monologues, his morphine monologues.
Maybe I should. Maybe I should.
Anyway, I'm getting distracted, but I'm really happy I found this eight point story arc thing
because it seems to work and this Lee McGeorge, who's... I finished the course of the 21 videos that he had
talking about structuring your novel, writing your novel, novel writing, that's what it's called.
He says a couple of times, he doesn't explain, but he makes an illusion.
He says, oh, I think I'm going to use a mini arc here.
And I think he's saying, I'm going to use the eight point arc structure for this scene or this chapter or this little concept.
And it doesn't take up that much space. So it's a very flexible, very scalable device tool.
And I think the great thing about it or the one thing to pay attention to is that I guess the resolution for the eight point arc,
if you're going to be using it in a chapter and every chapter, to go from chapter to chapter,
you have to set it up so that your resolution changes the status quo and improves it or deepens it in some way.
Well, it's kind of like an open ended thing. Like maybe it's like on the one hand, this is good, but this is bad.
So like, oh, I made two steps forward and one step back.
Maybe that's what it needs to be in order to keep that momentum going and keep propelling the reader into the next chapter.
Because I've heard that chapter timing chapters should end not when events end, but when something else new is about to start.
So like your protagonist knocks on a door or hears a knock on the door.
That could be the end of the chapter because, well, actually, the door needs to be open. Right.
So you might want to turn to the next page and see who's at the door. And I mean, that statement works for either.
The protagonist knocked and they want to see who answers the door or if nobody does.
And also the if they're inside and the door is knocked knocking or gets knocked on,
then they're either going to answer it or they're not.
And you don't know who that person is necessarily.
Who's coming to the door. So I think that's really interesting.
And it kind of makes sense that there's this idea of the invisible question at the start of a story.
I don't know that it has to be in the first line or just on the first paragraph.
Sure, the first page. But I mean, I think probably first line is best that you start with a statement or information being given to the given to or experienced by the reader.
That forms an invisible question in their mind and it hooks them.
I think just by that question, they are hooked and propelled to read through the rest of the story to see what it's like or just see what happens.
So that compels them. And I would think maybe your chapter endings, you're going to want to have an invisible question there, too,
which I think it's invisible because you're not stating the question.
Who could be at the door? What's on the other side of this wall that I hear knocking?
That you say, you know, you let the character experience it and you let the audience or the reader observe this question, quandary, mystery, whatever.
And you present it to them through, I guess, just through telling them or through showing them it.
And then you allow them to ask the question. That way they're compelled to.
They're hooked in and they want to read the next thing and see what exactly happens.
So anyway, then you don't have to do a false cliffhanger type thing.
But if you're clever enough, I'm sure you can figure out a way to to make it work.
The you in this case would be me, because I mean, I don't care about your writing,
but I'm not trying to claim the authority to be an instructor and tell you how to write yourself.
I'm just telling you how I'm thinking about doing my stuff going forward.
So, yeah, it's a very interesting process.
And well, I don't know what else to say.
This is crazy. I feel like I'm learning and I feel like so much new is happening that I almost feel embarrassed of the fact that I've been calling myself a writer for years
and that I don't have some of these things down.
But I mean, I don't know.
I'm in repair. I'm not together, but I'm getting there, I guess you could say to quote the part of my time.
That's not true. It's a John Mayer line, by the way.
So anyway, yeah, I'm going to go to the I'm quoting John Mayer.
It's time for me to go. That's just that's the rule.
That's the rule. So I hope that you stick around to come back next time for more development of my writing.
Actually, I think next week is going to be a it's the Goblin the Princess of the Goblin book chat.
So the Princess of the Goblin skimming leaves episode.
So I really love that book.
I have a lot to say about it.
And I have a lot I sometimes have a lot to say about it and not a lot to say about it.
It sparks a lot of tangents.
I already recorded the episode.
So I'm just letting you know.
I recorded the episode and it sparks a lot of tangents.
And it's just a very interesting book that's very provocative to me.
And it's very like meaningful or profound, even though it's a simple children's fantasy tale.
And I think if you check it out yourself, which I strongly encourage you do because it's a classic.
Yeah, I don't know that's a recognized classic today, but it should be and it is.
And it's so fabulous.
I think even if you're 10, I mean, if you were a kid or you are a kid now,
you got to listen to that book. That's all I'm going to say.
So anyway, come back for that and then come back the week after that.
This is episode 24, right?
So that should be up to 25.
So come back to 26 for more of my chronicling myself as a writer, as an author.
So guys trying to figure this all out.
And I don't know what I'll have for you then, but I'm sure it'll be something new and different and interesting.
And it'll definitely be me at a later stage from where I am right now.
And I'll be somewhere moving along in my journey.
So I invite you to join me there.
And until next time, folks, be well.
This is MJ signing out.
I hope you enjoyed that.
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