Writing fiction never seems to be a straightforward journey. After publishing Spectrum: Stories of Science Fiction, Fantasy, the Unusual and the Sometimes Ordinary, I expected the next book to come easier. It didn’t. For years, I churned through drafts of fantasy worlds, horror concepts—some a skinny 10,000 words, others a chunky 50,000. None of them went anywhere. Then I found War Dogs: Pit Bull.
I had the ideas. The fantasy project alone had pages of worldbuilding notes, a desert world waiting to be explored. But every time I sat down to draft, I’d hit 30,000 words and stall. Then 20,000. Then 10,000. The motivation I needed to push through 390-plus pages simply wasn’t there. The problem wasn’t the stories. It was how I approached writing a first draft.
Horror wasn’t the answer either. I’d toyed with vampires: vampires on motorcycles and vampires in space, preferring Twinkies to blood. Generic. I dropped my pen in disgust and did what I always do when a brain cramp sets in: turned on the television. It was Christmas 2024. I flipped through a million streaming options and landed on Die Hard. I’d seen it more times than I have fingers to count, but it kept me glued until the bearer bonds fell from the sky and the credits rolled over Christmas music. That’s when it hit me.
Why not pay homage to the 80s action movies that shaped me? Total Recall. Terminator. Commando. Films that were once a staple for anyone who grew up in that era, and maybe a new generation would discover them through a book that captured their spirit. If writing could feel the way watching those movies felt, maybe I’d actually finish something. I had my Why.
I picked up the pen and typed. Ten thousand words in, my fun-engine began to stutter. By twenty thousand, the gas tank crept toward empty. By thirty thousand, I quit. The same wall. The same frustration. Why was this happening again?
More coffee only made me jittery while staring at the blank page. So I looked backward. I pulled out my short story collection and reread the pieces I liked best: The Sound of Blue, Jump Trains andSimultaneity and A Sarjeta. Each one had taken less than a day to write. My fingers had flown over the keyboard. How? I flipped through the collection once, twice, three times before the answer surfaced. Those stories had practically written themselves.
Short. Story. As in short. A thousand words, maybe ten thousand. Stories simple enough that I just wrote to the end before reviewing anything. But when I set a 75,000-word project in front of myself, that little editor living in my head woke up. He told me I was going to screw up something this big, so he’d better work alongside me. He scrutinized every paragraph, every sentence, every word. He wouldn’t let me put anything on the page. That was my second eureka. I’d been wrestling my inner critic instead of writing, losing focus on story while playing grammar police and demanding beautiful turns of phrase on every page. I needed to write like I did with short stories: move forward, don’t look back. Be like Bruce Willis, tie a firehose around my waist, and jump.
This was the second euraka! moment. I was getting tired of wrestling with the inner critic. And I was losing focus on a story and turning into the grammar police with a touch of a poet who demanded every page have at least one beautiful turn of phrase. I had to be more like the time I’d write a short story and just keep moving forward. Put something on the page and move on. Don’t look back. Be like Bruce Willis, tie a firehose around my waist, and jump.
I took that new approach to the first draft. No editing. No looking back. Just forward momentum until I reached the end. And I finished a novel. Not a polished novel. Not something you’d sit down with over coffee. But a skeleton. A complete story that actually took fewer pages than the final work would become. Now I could go back to page one, expand, correct. Now that little editor could help instead of hinder.
Before I let that editor loose, I learned one more thing: plotting. It’s not what I thought it was. Not a formula to copy over, not the rigid structure from Save the Cat! that sends writers up a steep ramp only to crash into the rubble of a thousand formulaic stories. Plotting has earned a bad reputation because too much bad advice wants your money. But real plotting is something else. It’s organic. It builds the story over time.
And my take on plotting is a story for another time.
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