S1E15 - You're a WriTER, not a WritCAN'T

Hello, and welcome to behind the Locked Doors, a podcast that's actually just a conference call that really could have been an email. This is our take two of this, because the first one was so chaotic that we just had to call a mulligan and start over. So if we are a little bit out of sorts, that's why, in fact, I didn't even introduce my. I am Scott Paladin, and I am writing a horny werewolf podcast called It Takes a Wolf.

And I'm Sam Stark. I am writing as in west, which is a spin off of Unspeakable Distance.

Yes. So our Jack. For the record, I almost called Jack Link again. I always do this.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, feel it about to come out of my mouth. Jack is out again. They are still moving. We're sending our love to them because that is a fucking time and a half, even in the best of times. So, Sam, how did you do on your homework?

My homework was to get with Jack and kind of go over the beginning of the podcast, but because Jack is in the middle of moving. Yeah, we did the, you know, ships crossing in the night. Hey, we should meet at some point. But I didn't want to put anything else on them since. Yes, moving is absolutely terrible.

Yeah, but you said you got some. Or. Yeah, you already told me that you got some additional planning done, I think.

Yes. I didn't. I didn't do what I gave. What I assigned myself for homework, but I did do other things. I worked through some other issues that I had, and I put everything in a new Excel spreadsheet, because, as I said before, I've already told this story because I am not a planner, but I'm also not really a pantser. Oh, there's the cat. I'm not really a panther either. I do the skeletons of things. I work towards specific plot points, but I don't really do anything else. Hold on, hold on.

Hey, I think the cat's about to knock some stuff over.

Oh, my God, Cat. You've already. You've already completely destroyed an episode once. All right, hopefully everybody can still hear me and everything is still working.

I can hear you, and I can see the. The. I can see a bed. So we're. We're still good. Obviously, the cat should just get on the bed so that I can watch the cat.

Yeah, you can.

That would be the ideal.

No, he's. He's gonna try and destroy the. The foam paneling on the inside of my booth. Yay.

Yay. Okay, so, yeah, you got. You got some Skeletonizing. Done. And let's see. On my end, I have made more progress on episode three. I am. It's not done done, but it's like coming in on the home stretch. So I should be able to get that finished relatively quickly. That is three of eight. So I am not that far from being halfway done with like, my. My initial right through. Because the rule I've got, I've set for myself is that I am going to write everything. All. All of the episodes are going to have a draft done before I go back in and start, like, making things work and making changes and stuff like that and start doing editing. So that's kind of exciting. That feels almost like I'm about to hit a milestone, which is cool.

Yeah, no, that's a really good idea. Now, I think. I don't know if this is something that you have thought about yet, but what are the. What, what do you think the runtime for your episodes are going to be?

They are. They're all almost about five. Almost kind of bang on 5,000 words, which for me runs to about 35 to 40 minutes, typically when I've. When I've had that kind of translation in the past. So that's about what they're going to run, I'm guessing. Anyway, that's. That's kind of how it feels. I'm not. I haven't really been setting a goal for myself in that way, but that seems to be how things are working out.

That's cool. I only ask because there was some discord on. I think it was. I'm not sure. And it was people talking about lengths of podcasts, and obviously it varies through genre.

Oh, yeah.

Because if you're listening to a Talking Heads podcast, people listen to three hours of that stuff. But if it's an actual audio drama, there's a really. There's one side of the fence or the other. Some people are like, you need a half an hour and that's all you need between 20 and 30 minutes. And some people are like, I want an hour, 45 minutes to an hour. And it's really divided. And it's just. It's an interesting thing because, like, I don't. I don't really notice the difference. Like, I binge everything that I listen to anyway.

Yeah, the. I think that. I like that the genre. Genre. The format has lots of variation because, like the fact that sinkhole done by our friend Kale Brown, which is amazing. You should go listen to it if you haven't. Those episodes are like 10 to 20 minutes at most. Like, they're real short. The fact that they are short was a huge benefit for, like, letting me get through it. Right. Like, that just was not an investment of time. And they're exactly as long as they need to be. And I really, really like that that exists simultaneously. You know, season four of Breathing Space even is like, the one where everybody went off the hook. And I'm like, I don't. Of the. Of the episodes proper, I don't think we have one that's less than an hour. I think, like, they're all coming in an hour.

Yeah.

And, like, I like that as an audience member, I'm like, both of those things can exist. And I don't think that, like, the one is necessarily better than the other. It's just, like, the preference from the audience, you know?

Yeah.

Um, I. I definitely think I am of two minds about how. Whether or not you should even be setting a goal for yourself, though. Um, I am not currently setting a goal for myself. And like, on Breathing Space, we originally started off with, like, we're gonna. We're gonna hit 30 minutes. 30 minutes is our. Is our time that we're going to shoot for. That was season one that got blown out the window in season one, like, within. Within the space of writing a single season, we said that that can't happen. And the watch word has been since then that stories are as long as they need to be.

Oh, yeah.

Which is, I think, a really. It can be a gentle way to approach yourself where you're like, you're not writing to an arbitrary number and which I think is good because sometimes you write a story and it only takes 20 minutes to get through. And sometimes you write a story and it takes. It really does need the whole hour. And it's. It's back, it's packed, and the pacing is all good and all that stuff. I do think that there is. When you give yourself the freedom to just be as long as it needs to be, sometimes that relieves you of the pressure to edit and to make things brief when they can be brief and to, like, cut out unnecessary fat and stuff like that. And it allows you to be lax in what you're writing. That's not always the case, but sometimes that can be. That the additional pressure of. Can you make this a bit shorter? To keep it, you know, to keep the. Keep it a little bit snappier to remove, you know, to not waste your time and our time and production time on it is a valuable thing that I think is sometimes arbitrary. Like I don't think it's, it's valuable enough to set yourself, like, to necessarily set yourself an arbitrary time limit of like, we are only going to do half an hour and no more the way like a half hour TV show would. But like, there is definitely value to like having some pressure to not just go on and on and on and that, you know, and art comes from limitations and things like that sometimes too. So I don't know. I'm. I. It's not something that I can give like a definite like, thing of you should do it this way or you shouldn't do it this way. But it is something that as you are going through the process of making any kind of, of story, like being cognizant of, you know, I don't, you know, the tension between making it as long as, or as short as the story dictates for itself versus, like trying to make it fit a format and a time length or to cut fat or to make it, you know, to give yourself the. Or, you know, sometimes you need to expand something that's longer. I just talked about the man from Earth with Anna. It'll be on my interview podcast. And like there's a 30 minute section of that movie that probably should be cut, but then the movie would be too short, so you might as well put it in.

You know, I think, I think I know what you're talking about. Yeah. I think. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's this, this whole particular conversation is so crazy because in my, in my writers group.

Yeah.

I'm. Well, there's. There's me and one other person that are basically like, we, we just don't write short.

Yeah.

And all the, all the calls for fiction for like, like magazines and stuff, like online magazines, they, they're all like, they give this great prompt and they, they have this wonderful thing set up with all this art ready to go. And then they're like, okay, we want your stories that are between 5,000 and 7,000 words.

Yeah.

And I'll, I'm just like, you want me to write a story that's only 7,000 words? Like, I. Sometimes I can't even fathom that.

Yeah.

And put, Trying to put us, for me, trying to put some stories within a word count is just, no, I can't do it. And it like completely destroys all my creativity. But on the other hand, when I was writing my book and I was putting it up on Vella.

Yeah.

They only allow you to do 5,000 word chapters.

Yeah.

And I don't know if it was because each Chapter was a tiny part of the whole or if it was just giving me structure and something for me to write to every single week. But it worked. Like that worked. I was able to write chapters that were right around 5,000 words every single week. And it actually kind of helped because I had something that like a specific definitive thing to work for every week. But if you had told me you got to write a story that's 5,000 words long, I would have been like, fuck you. So it's so weird. And again, it's a combination of like it really is. Sometimes it's constraining and sometimes it's helpful. It's weird.

Yeah. I would encourage you and art and anybody who is listening to this to what's the way I want to phrase this? It's definitely not an essentialist kind of thing where you're like, I can't do this. You can absolutely do it. But it's not necessarily the best approach for every project, if that makes sense. Like it obviously that sort of chapter word limit worked really well for you in one circumstance. But when you are presented with the idea of doing a self sustained story in a similar sort of structure that for whatever reason doesn't jive with the way your brain works, I'm sure that you could make it work. It's one of the things like I don't. Writing is a skill. Like it's a muscle that you can build up over time. My foster dog is bothering one of my other dogs and I'm hearing them growling. So it's a muscle you can build up. Even particular types of writing are things that you can work at and get better at and oh, it's because he has a bone and he's definitely the one to take it from him.

Oh, you're so cute.

So I don't think, I mean there may be things that are sort of built into people's nature that they just can't do certain things. But I think that if you, if you are willing to be open and not take it too seriously and try that like you actually will find. I think most people will find they can do things they wouldn't have thought they were able to and be good at them. The. I don't know if I've talked about this on pod, but I spent like a year writing very short form erotica for money, which was. And the whole reason why this, the business, this business model doesn't exist anymore. But it used to be that the payment structure for the, the Amazon like independent like ebook delivery system worked out that like 5,000 to 7,000 word titles. You could make a bunch of money off of them because you could just pump them out. And you get paid based on, like, people reading your work. And it would be a little bit of money for every person, but a bunch of people could read them. So the I was, I was similar to. I felt very similarly to you do. Before I started doing it, I'm like five to seven thousand words. That's not enough time to do anything. Like, it's just not like you can barely establish who your characters are in that time. And then I spent like a solid eight months doing that really, really consistently. And just because you can't. I mean, in theory, there was no hard limit. You could go longer. But like, if you do that, you're leaving money on the table because you don't get paid any extra for having extra words. So you just, you're just. The incentive is that you just need to just chug, Chug stuff out. And after doing it for a while, I found that it like, fundamentally changed the way that I approach storytelling because I realized, like, how much. How easy. Not how easy, but how, how, how effective it can be to leave things out of the story that are not necessary to like, give, like, provide just like the bare minimum of what is necessary for people to get what you're talking about and let them fill in all the rest. And for some genres, that works really well. And for other genres, it doesn't necessarily jive as completely. I don't think that you can write like an epic fantasy novel that way. But like, it was something that I absolutely thought I could not do and then I was not forced to do it, but encouraged to do it from economics. And I found that I am now good at it. It's a thing that I feel is sort of a fundamental part of my writing style now.

Nice.

So like, yeah, really just say that like, the, the brain has more plasticity in it than you might imagine. And you can figure things out and you really can't. Like, if it's a thing that you think, oh, I just. I could not work that way. I bet you could. I bet you could. Is my. Is the way I'd say.

And I have, I have done it. It's just not my.

Yeah, obviously. I mean, you wrote a whole book that way.

The, the, the other thing I think is really important when you are like, if you're like me and you write long and you are given a task where you have to write short, you have to also choose the Right. Story. Because there are stories in your brain that are not going to fit in 5,000 words. And so a lot of the time, because my writers group used to do, like, we would meet every other week and we would write stories for each other and we would, like, practice and stuff. And a lot of the time I just kind of had to knuckle down and write something that was under, you know, whatever the word count was for the week. And it's really important to just find the story that actually does that. Because a lot of the times, yeah, when. A lot of the times when I'm looking at these calls, these prompts, I just think of a novel, I think of all these things that I can do and this huge story, and that's just where my brain goes immediately. And you have to like, okay, now you have to. You have to take this piece of this story that you want to tell. You have to like, tell the story that's going to fit in 5,000 words and not the novel, obviously. And that's another thing that I have to work on in my brain because, I mean, I wrote one episode for Ash's Paranormal and that was kind of hard because it's like, you gotta fit it in this little half an hour spot. But I was like, no, I'll just tell the story that fits in here. You just have to kind of make your brain do the thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And interestingly to me, like, I, again, I felt very much the same way about, like, I can't write short. I can't write short. I have to write these big, long, epic things. And then I did the erotica stuff for a little bit and then I had a break. And then we did Breathing Space. And Breathing Space is an anthology that was the first time, that was the first serious writing I'd done in a few years. And because of that, I was also forced to be like, okay, I have to tell something that fits into, you know, 5 or 7,000 words of dialogue, which is. It's not the same as 5000 words of prose. 5000 words of dialogue is way longer than 5000 words of prose, but it is still there. These self contained stories, they don't have longer arcs. And I got, again, I spent a couple of years doing that. I felt like, I feel like I'm pretty good at it. And then when I started to do It Takes a Wolf, I'm like, oh, all of these longer form muscles, they're totally atrophied. Like, I have definitely been feeling the struggle of like, rejiggering my brain such that I can like, get it into the mode of like, doing a longer form thing. But I. So, like. Yeah, again, but it's a thing that you can, you can do it. I think that it's. And also probably much like many other skills, the more different forms of writing and storytelling that you practice, the better you'll get at kind of everything. Like skills transfer. It's not just a matter of like, it's not like a, A, a video game where if you put points into, into poetry writing, that, that won't improve your prose writing.

No.

Like, it all, it all helps.

Yeah. And my, my writing in general just, it got so much better after I started doing shorter stuff with my writers group. I don't do it much anymore. I don't do actually a lot of writing now. Sure. But my, my craft, I guess.

Yeah.

Was enriched because I made myself do other stuff.

Well, like the, I think a really important part of becoming better at something like writing or art or any kind of like, creation is something that people sometimes forget, which is that you need the cycle. Not necessarily feedback, but the cycle of you create a thing and then you look at it and see how you feel about it and like, have it. And it is important in a lot of ways for you to. I'm not going to say you have to finish a thing to look back at it, but that's when people normally do it. Like, they'll write the whole novel and then they'll go back and they'll read it and do the second draft and editing, but then they'll get done with it. And when they are done, they'll be like, okay, now that it's finished, how do I feel about the finished product? And that almost like you that important, that little bit where at the end where you start to, like, you know, introspectively think about how the process, how it went and how the end result turned out and how that all worked. That is really important to actually improving. If you sat down and wrote and rewrote the same novel over and over again, never, never finishing it, and never like, sitting back to like, look at it as a done product. If you do that for 20 years, I don't think that you'd come up. You wouldn't. You would not have gotten as good as if you had spent the exact same time just churning things out, finishing them, having that evaluation period and then being like, okay, how do I feel about that?

No.

Yeah. So it's like, you don't necessarily. I don't want to Tell people that they have to have feedback from outside sources, because that can be, that can, that can be very useful. But can we've, we've talked in the past about how sometimes getting amateur advice is, like, worse than nothing.

Absolutely the worst. Yes.

But like, you as a, as a, as a writer, as a, as a, as if anybody who creates artists, you just looking at it and going, because you have taste, you've watched movies, you've read books, you know what's good and what's not good. So, like, if you go back and look at it and say, honestly, how do I feel about this? What can I discover that I didn't intend to put here? Things like that. That's a really important part. And I'm actually, I think I may have mentioned this, but I'm really glad that we started this podcast, not only because it has been really good for productivity, but also because this has become a point where you and I am forced to think about the process of writing. And that has given me little, Little moments over the course of, of working on this larger project. This larger, this project's not anywhere close to being done yet. But because I am forced to be introspective about what I've done and how it's work and how the way that I have worked has resulted in what I've got so far, I found myself, like, I feel like I've learned more in the last six months than I did in the previous, like, 10 years just because I've spent more time thinking about it actively. And part of that was. Yeah, part of that was, you're very welcome.

I'm just kidding.

But I mean, like, part of it was like having a scenario where, you know, we are. Every couple of weeks we get together and I have to have something to not have to. But I feel, I feel compelled to have something to say about it and that it makes me think about it.

And yeah, for me, the moment of noticing.

Really important.

Yeah, yeah, for me, I get excited, like when we're going to do, when it's the week of the podcast week. It doesn't make any sense if I say it that way, because every week is podcast week for me. But yeah, when it's, when it's our podcast week, it's cool because I can be like, oh, I have stuff to talk about and I'll be able to hear what, what Scott and Jack have to talk about. And so it's very, It's a very positive, uplifting thing. And it doesn't ever feel pressuring, which is what everybody needs. Everybody needs that.

It's really. It's really been very, very helpful. Okay. Um, I should grab myself some lunch before I go back to work. Um, so let's real quick set ourselves some expectations. Um, do you want to. You want to repeat on trying to work with Jack again, or do you have a different.

Yeah, I need. I still need to sit down with Jack and specifically talk about the beginning of the podcast because it is absolutely what is holding me up.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I feel that really hard where you're like, when you have that instinct to work linearly. Linear, linearly. Because you want to, like, make it sure. Everything, you know, is built on a good foundation and all that stuff.

And especially that moment.

You're like, well, I don't know what this is, so I can't do the thing next to it, you know?

Exactly. And especially since this beginning of this podcast is actually the backbone of the entire podcast. It's like the actual thing that the entire podcast hinges on.

Yeah, yeah. And because you're having to explain backstory and it's an opportunity to recontextualize some of that and make it, you know. Yeah, I understand. Like, just need to. Need to sit down. So. Yeah, hopefully y'all can find a time to do it. I will. I will hopefully not monopolize Jack's time with whatever intensely long conversation about Starship Troopers we have next weekend. So hopefully they find time in addition to that. Okay, great. Sim. Similarly to last time, I am also gonna. I'm gonna. I think I can finish episode three, at least to, you know, the satisfaction that I will move on to the next one probably this weekend, honestly, provided I have. I get some time on it. And then I don't know if I want to dig immediately into episode four or if I want to start. I started to do work on some of the more high concept episodes which are coming later in the. In the season, and one of which is a flashback, so it doesn't need to flow into or out of the other things, so it's easier to work on on its own. And I think I might want to. I might want to actually spend some time on those ideas because that will a. I can work out of, out of order, and they don't necessarily mean I get stuck on stuff, but also it means that that can give me that. Sometimes you do stuff like that where you're like, oh, I write the. I haven't written the flashback yet. I'll write the flashback. And that informs the way the character acts in the present kind of stuff like that. It might be worth thinking about. So I'm going to. I can't guarantee which one I'm going to do, but I'm going to one of the two. Either I'm going to be working on the flashback episode, or I'll dig into four.

Oh, very exciting.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, we will catch y'all in two weeks. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you for joining us for behind the Locked Doors, a library of Cursed knowledge production podcast thing. I don't know if you are interested in any of these projects. You can head over to Library Horse, which will eventually redirect to a webpage once I make it. You know, if you want to support the podcast, we do have a Patreon. It's patreon.com cursedknowledge. See y'all next week. No, wait. See y'all in two weeks.