Welcome to the 15th (fifteenth) writing club update. Opening Manu Saadia’s Trekonomics to page 15 (“Portrait of the Author as a Young Fan”), we find this fiction related snippet:
When the movie [Star Trek: The Motion Picture] was over, I really, really did not want to leave the bridge of the Enterprise. I had to make that experience last. I still remember that very precise feeling, equal parts wonderment, recognition, and melancholy: this was the place I had been looking for, this was where I wanted to live, this was where I belonged. I had found my promised land. Pity it was all fiction and make-believe.
A pity indeed that the post-scarcity almost-utopia of Star Trek’s Federation is only make-believe. But then isn’t a story an almost-world, waiting to be brought forward by the midwives of action. Maybe casting writers and artists as parents is overstating our importance a little bit… it’s nice to think about, though.
But what I can’t overstate is how great our writers are:
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You certainly do give the impression of being a very methodical writer, but I understand that for some people structure is simply a tool and not necessarily an all-encompassing way of life.
TIL about the the MECE-principle–that sent me down a fun Wikipedia rabbit hole. Hearing you describe how your arraying your sections really sounds tantalizing, but you’re right in that it wouldn’t translate well to fiction–not unless that fiction were very structured haha. Kind of absurdly so… sort of… fun to puzzle over…
But no! That’s silly. I’m just a sucker for systems, even though what they often amount to in my case is procrastination more than productivity. In that regard, you seem to have a decent handle on the most important part of writing, which is of course, actually committing words to the page.
Thanks for sharing so much of your process. This is exactly the kind of deep diving I hoped to get into with this writing club.
If you want your fiction to convey a specific, coherent message, you can of course still structure that underlying message this way so that you end up with well-argued message. The task is then to inject those arguments into the story. I guess this could be used as either a starting-point for the story (i.e. the message being the main reason you write in the first place) or something that can be developed independent of the main story (but then more as some kind of side-snacks? otherwise it could feel forced)