S2E10 - Writing is also Reading

Sam.

This tier did, too. So.

How I just punched that shelf.

Like, Sam. Sam is the one that does the injuries during recordings.

Not.

Not you, like, don't fall into that hole, man.

All right. Hello and welcome to behind the Locked Doors, a place where sometimes we injure ourselves. I am Scott Paladin. I am working on a horny werewolf audio drama called It Takes a Wolf.

My name is Sam Stark. I'm working on a spinoff of the actual play Unspeakable Distance called Azen West.

I am Jack, and I'm also working on Az in West.

I'm Interiority, AKA Mike. And I'm mainly working on staying alive at the moment. But beyond that, I'm going to be writing my audio drama, Sundar.

Sometimes working on a thing is a sort of ephemeral thing. It's like, in the back of your mind while you just, like, make. Because, like, it's a. On Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like doing the creative projects right up at the top. Sometimes you need to get that foundation to go. So it all counts.

Yeah. I mean, a couple of weeks lying delirious on the couch has helped, like, the thought process. Like, you know, like, I've come up with some ideas. Let's just say that.

Free. Free up those neurons. My update is. Let's see, last time I said I was going to start working on episode eight, which is the pillar changeling episode. I've got about two grand into that. I'm pretty pleased with it so far, so I'm going to call that a success. I was just going to try to get as much done, and I think I'm quite pleased with that progress. How about you, Sam?

That's awesome.

It's actually Jack's homework.

Homework. Oh, Jack. That's right.

Yeah.

I remember you guys talking in the thing.

Yeah, no, it's all good. I. I rough. I finished rough drafting the second episode. I know Sam has notes for me. I have not yet received the notes because we were like, when the hell are we going to have time this week to, like, meet and do notes?

What even. Is this week?

Yeah.

Crazy. Yeah.

But I have. I have lots of notes, and I'm actually really excited because. Because I have notes. Like, I have, like, ideas and, like, it. It, like, I don't know. It knocked something loose, so I'm pretty.

Hell, yeah.

That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. It's great to see you guys making progress. It feels great.

This last couple of weeks, doing anything, literally.

I know it's been a while since you guys have Made, like, real. But, like, it's now it seems like you're cruising. So this is great. I'm really excited for y' all. Thank you. How about you, Mike?

Well, I've not been around on the podcast for a while, and that's because I've been very ill for at least most of a month. Most of May has passed me by, but, you know, like, it has had its benefits. So I, you know, have like, rested a little bit. And although I've not really had the energy to do much, and to be honest, I've reached the point where I can't actually remember what exactly my homework was last time. I'm just going to assume it's progress on this project, which has happened. I have started writing the next episode, and more importantly, I have sat down with my good friend and, like, creative sounding board, Kael Brown, to basically talk through what we've got coming up in terms of thematically where it's going. And it's been really, really useful and interesting because we kind of found quite a few ways to kind of balance some opposing or contrasting themes within certain episodes and tell similar stories in different ways and perspectives. And, yeah, it's making me really excited to get back into the writing process again. Just waiting for my body to be able to keep me upright for longer than half an hour to allow me to do it. But even though I'm about a thousand into the next episode, which is good.

So, yeah, that's fantastic. That's great.

Yeah, very cool.

Awesome. Well, we have a topic for this episode, but I'm going to start off by having a little bit of a request for either y' all guys or the audience. If you are or know somebody who, like, sings and plays guitar and maybe could do a little bit of tune writing. I need a demo basically made of a song. So if, you know, please DM me, my DMs are open or send somebody my way, because I have a little thing that's coming down the pipe for this project.

So.

Sick.

Awesome.

Yeah. And okay, so. And the topic was, I thought of this the other week and is how often when doing a big project, you know, mini episodes of a series or writing a book or something like that, how often do you all go back and just reread everything from the start?

So not even partial rereads. You're talking like a full reread, front to back.

Exactly. Because I'm used to working on short episodes where, like, you can reread the whole thing in, like, 20 minutes. You know, you Just blast through and you go back and kind of recheck everything and then working on longer things. I'm like, it. You go longer and longer without rereading everything. And you're like, what did I write in episode one? Is that there. Was that just an idea I had or. But then, you know, rereading is a. It's an investment if it's a longer piece. You know, I think there's actually. I did the calculation last night. I am 37,000 words of dialogue into my project right now. That's not counting directions. That's literally just words, characters speak. That is a not insignificant amount of time just to go through, but it can be useful. So I was interested in what you guys. If you had opinions.

Yeah, I mean, I'll go and say that I have to ration myself from doing it. Like, it's something I want to do, and it feels slightly indulgent, but it's. But it's also because it's kind of one of my favorite parts of writing is kind of going back over what I've done before, like, looking for things that I can tighten. Looking for things like an edit, reminding myself of kind of like, you know, again, kind of like the way certain characters speak or things I've set up previously because, you know, I don't have the best memory in the world. Like, it's. So it's nice to be able to kind of like, reassure myself that, yes, no, I did set this up. And yes, this person does speak. But, yeah, like, it can be a time sinking. It can be something that can suck me into it. And given that, like, the thing that I hate the most is the, like, getting out the initial draft, like, the thing that, you know, it causes me to literally bleed on occasion.

Yeah.

Sometimes I find myself turning to that as an excuse. So I feel like I'm doing progress, but actually all I'm doing is just going back and, you know, just noodling around in stuff that's already been done and kind of rereading it, you know. Yeah. When I really should be kind of knuckling down and getting, like, more things just down on the page so I can then kind of edit it later. So, yeah, so for me, like, it's very much kind of. It's a reward. It's like, if you finish writing this episode, you can go back and when you. So when you do the edit, you can make sure it's tonally consistent or whatever. Or when you finish this arm, that's when you go back and make sure. Obviously, I'm nowhere near as far along as Scott is, so, you know, at the moment, the consequences for giving it a temptation are a lot lower. But as I go on, I'm going to be hitting kind of like 40 to 50,000 words of dialogue with this project. And so that's going to be an issue.

Yeah, yeah. It takes it. It is a real investment of time to like go through and just like skimming, you know, kind of flipping through and reading sections that may not take very long, but, like going and properly reading a thing. Yeah. I was surprised when I did Fable of the Family and I was like going back and rereading it and I'm like, this took three hours. Jesus.

That was a lot of words that you wrote, Scott.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam, I know you've written several, like, novel length works. How do you feel about this?

Yeah, I have a couple published novels. And then before I did like actual writing that made me money, I did fan fiction.

Yeah.

And I was the kind of fan fiction author that would do like 45 chapter, 200,000 word, you know, epic ones. And that is, it's an interesting thing because it's two. Two very, very different ways of putting stuff out into the world. But the process was kind of similar because with fanfiction you put it out chapter by chapter and it's like, technically, once you put it out, you can't change stuff. I mean, you can, but like, usually you don't because your readers will be like, what the hell? And so it is kind of like episodic writing because you put up a chapter and then usually my process for writing the next chapter would be to reread the last chapter. And one of my core writers group buddies, Katrina, she actually, there's a term for that, it's like circular editing or something, I can't remember. But it's where you. Yeah, you go back a little bit and you edit until you get to where you need to start writing. And then it's almost like a warm up for yourself. And that's how I would do my fan fiction. When I was doing my novels. It was a little bit different because I wasn't obviously posting it really. I technically was posting it, but it was to my patreon and I could do whatever I wanted with that.

Oh, yeah.

So it was like writing a book. Normally it was just people were looking at it as I was doing it. And so I would do the same thing. I would go back and I would reread the chapter before. But I found with the Novel because I'm a pantser and I didn't want it to get too out of control. I would go back to the beginning often because I just had so many different threads that I wanted to make sure really actually connected. Because in fan fiction, who gives a shit if, like, a couple threads are dropped? Like, it's. It's fan fiction. It's fun.

Yeah. We're, like, here to have a good time.

Yes. But with my. With my novel, the one that I was really, really trying to get published, I really wanted to make all of those themes and everything work. And I would very often go back and start from the beginning and notice something new or be like, oh, I totally forgot that I had this character say that. And so it. A lot of the time, helped or inspired to go all the way back. It took, obviously, it took a lot of time because it started the books, like, 130,000 words or something. So, like, when I was getting to the end, rereading the entire book was kind of a process, but I think. I don't know, it would just keep me in the mindset, and it made it so the end connected really well to the beginning.

Jack, do you have thoughts?

It sounds like both, actually. All of y' all have done a lot more, like, long form writing than I have. Most of what I write is, like, episode length, small things. I think the longest finished piece of writing I've ever produced is, like 45,000 words. Like, not all that long, actually, but that was, like a piece of fanfiction that I was writing chapter by chapter. But I wasn't posting a chapter by chapter. I went back in and edited all of the chapters until I felt like the whole thing was completed. And then I posted them a couple days apart, each one. But the whole work was completed. I forced myself to do that because I do the same thing, circular edit. Like, when I'm writing the new chapter, I go back to the one before and, like, kind of run myself up to this, the new stuff I need to write so that I have fresh in my head, like, where I was coming from. And then I was also doing things like going back in and adding, like, additional chapters between parts I thought were finished. Because I was like, okay, something's missing in here. So I, like, go back and add another section somewhere. So I am, like, a heavy, like, rereader. Not usually front to back, but, like, in. In big chunks. Yeah, throughout. Because I feel like otherwise. I do. I like drop. I drop threads. I don't reference back to things that I wish I had reference back to. Whenever I try to write something straight through, I'm always like, okay, wait. There were things in here that I wanted to bring forward and I just can't keep them all in my brain at the same time. So, yeah, I do re read a lot.

It's.

It's definitely a good way. Rereading is definitely a good way to sort of reload all of that stuff into working memory where you're like, I need to have access to all of these ideas, but it's been a week since I last touched this, so they're not there. Yeah. And I definitely feel like there's a. If you have stepped away for whatever reason, like, I did the move just recently where for like a month and a half, I didn't touch a project basically. And I got back and like, I couldn't. I'm like, there's no way I can start this without just like rereading everything I have just to like, build the momentum and like, figure, you know, load everything back into working memory, get it, get it, get it running again, and also build momentum because that. It's so hard to start from nothing. You know, you're not working on something if you've had to take a long break for whatever reason or you've run into like a writer's block situation where you're stuck and you just like, sometimes going back and rereading that same sort of forward momentum of moving through the story gets the juices flowing and also works the same way that other things can. So that's interesting. Yeah, the shorter version of that seems really something you can make a lot of use of frequently where you're rereading the episode before or starting at the beginning, the one you're working on currently or chapter or whatever the smallest chunk of the story is.

Yes, yes.

Just because, like sitting down and being like, okay, well, I've got the line before the one that I've got. What was that? What was three pages up? Am I going to stop? And you're not investing that much time into it.

Well, yeah, the thing with the longer works is because it is such a time sink to go all the way back. And you also, like, you really only need like, generally speaking, the chapter before the section before is going to have the most relevant information for what you need going forward. Sometimes you do want to call back to stuff that's way at the beginning. But I think if you kind of limit your full, full rereads to like once in a while. I think Mike's onto Something like when you finish a section, when you finish an arc, whatever, then you go back to the beginning and get the whole swang of the thing, so to speak. I feel like that is a useful way to make sure your arcs are connecting, but not get so stuck up in like, okay, let's go back and load up every single detail from the literal very beginning of the work to where you are now.

Yeah, that's only. That's a thing that crazy people like me do. I don't recommend it at all. And I completely. I completely understand. And I planners people that plot their novels and their works. I admire them so much because another of my core writers group, Michael.

They.

Plot their entire book, the whole fucking thing, every single detail. Like, they'll have it in their outline and they will follow it. They'll start writing and they'll follow what they have and the plot line outline. And it just seems so much more cohesive and it makes more sense. But every time I've tried to do that, it hasn't worked. Cause my brain just does not work that way. Because I can't think of all the things that I want in the novel before I start it. Because it's much more organic for me.

You're a discovery writer.

Exactly. So I understand that I have to have the freedom to add things when I feel that I. When I think of them. But I've also tried very hard to take a lot of inspiration from plotters. Because if you can get a skeleton, like what we're doing with Az and West, if we can get a skeleton down, at least we have like a.

Sort of a road.

Even though it's like kind of goes in a lot of different. Not directions, but there's a lot of different lanes that we can go, but we're all going kind of to the same place.

So, yeah, I just got a dog. I promise this is relevant. I just got a dog who doesn't have to be. Who I think has never been leash trained. From what we can tell, she stands very nicely to get her harness put on, but she doesn't understand the concept of, or at least didn't at the beginning of just walking in front of a person on the end of a leash, like in a direction without just like wandering all over the place. Well, I think, like, you can learn to do that. Like, she's already getting better at going, like, forwards instead of, you know, like, trying to wind around my legs and wind around every single lamppost and like go under every single bush and like, you know, stop and sniff for 20 minutes, blah, blah, blah. But, like, it's a learnable skill, but it is difficult if you've never done it. And it's. You do, like, discover things along the way that you wouldn't if you were just blasting along your outline at full speed. Sometimes you stumble into something cool by wandering off the path and, like, sniffing around under a bush for 20 minutes. But if you do a whole lot of that by the end, sometimes you're like, where am I? What's happening? This is not my house. This is not my beautiful life. Where am I?

Yeah.

Yep. Yep. Well, your dog is so cute, by the way. Oh, my gosh.

No, thank you. Her name is Daphne, and I'm obsessed with her.

There is definitely something. I mean, like, Mike saying that to limit that reread is, I think, valuable for sure, because there's also something to be said for, like, as you reread something you've already written, that can cement those ideas in your head more and make the thing seem more concrete. And sometimes getting the distance lets you get back a step and say, if you forget what you wrote and then you come up with a better idea, you know, then just because you weren't locked into it because your brain forgot about it momentarily, it can lead to revisions. That's a separate problem I also have, which is that, like, as I am rereading something that I have written, I have the hardest time thinking about it being any different than it is. Like, I can tweak little lines here and there. I can kind of. But, like, the idea of going into a scene that's written already and restructuring it and rearranging things and moving things around or rewriting sections of it, I really struggle with that. The more that I read lots of stuff, I just write all the way through, didn't plan, it's done, and then I'm just done. That's it.

It's like, okay, that's it. It's over.

It's fix it. Right? Yeah. I have a hard time self editing that way. And I feel like some of that is also just the act of actually. Well, this flows into that, and this is how. And, like, I'm. It puts me back in the headspace of where I was when I wrote it the first time. And, like, this all seems to work, but, like, maybe that isn't the best way. But, like, I, like, have a hard time seeing that it could be any different.

Well, and it's funny because I feel like you're very good about suggesting those structural edits for Other people's work. Yeah, but you didn't write those things. So in your brain you're like, this is all changeable. But if you wrote it, you're like, well, I put it the way that it is, so that's the way that it is.

It's my baby. Yeah, well.

And it's not. It's not an emotional connection.

No, I don't like that.

Yeah.

The reason why I give that to other people is because that's the kind of feedback I would want as well.

Oh, sure, sure.

Not always. But also because. But, like, literally, as I'm reading, I'm like, I don't know. The fact that it exists has obliterated my ability to see that it could be any other way. A little bit. It's a thing I'm definitely working on. But, like, just the act of reading it or looking at it, being like, I can't. Like, this is how it is. Like, how else would it go?

Object permanence, but for words.

Exactly. So that's. But that's kind of a separate issue in ways. Yeah.

That's so interesting, though, because I'm like, the opposite.

Oh, yeah.

I've never had a problem Killing All My Darlings.

Yeah. We fully wrote a full episode of Azzan west, the first pilot. And then you were like, you know what? I don't think this is it. I don't think this is the structure we want. I think we wanna just literally redo this entire episode.

Welcome to writing with Sam. That will happen many times. I'm sure we'll have these entire episodes that don't actually make it, and I will be like, you know what? I'm gonna redo this whole thing. Because that's how I do stuff. I sometimes have to see it done wrong to know that it's wrong.

Yeah.

To me, that seems like a superpower. I can't imagine how it would be to just be like, ah, no. Oh, like, now this needs to be entirely different.

Let's just throw it out, stir this out and do something else.

I feel like I'd end up just rewriting it the exact same way.

Conversely, I would love. I would love to have object permanence, but with words. Sometimes, like, there, I wrote it, and now I don't have to fuck with it anymore. That would be nice once in a while. It'd be great.

As a treat.

Yeah. To myself.

Yeah.

So because I wanted to know how many words I'd written already, I did the full calculation for the. I did all the exports from all the Episodes and totaled everything and all that. And of course, this is not done. In fact, one episode because of recent edits, got 5,000 words shorter very recently, and I'm only part of the way through episode eight. But does anyone want to have a guess at how much of the. Of the words that will be spoken so far? How many? I will say as the narrator and the beast.

Can we do a percentage count versus A, like, actual number?

Percentage is what I'm okay.

Like, 80%.

Ooh.

Okay, that's a good guess. Anybody else?

I don't want to be like. And I was thinking 80% too, but, like, I kind of was.

But, like, 80%.

80Ish.

Yeah. I mean, I guess I'll do the kind of the quiz show thing where I let two people guess close by and you just go, well, you know what? I'm just going to go lower than that. So, like, if it is that, then I get closest and I win. Yeah. So I'll say. I'll say 50. There we go. 50%.

Okay.

Mike's got it. Yeah, it is 53% of the words written.

Damn. Killed it, Mike.

Now. But the 80% rule is not bad, because as of right now, if you total the main character together, which is me and whoever plays the other Voice, that's like 76, 78.

Oh, that's so funny. So we were all right. Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. We're all right. We're all winners.

I was just like, oh, look at this. And then, like, also somewhere in all of my scripts, I don't know where it is, there is a miss. I've got. I've got a. I've got a typo on the fool's name at one point, because there's one line that is question mark the fool. And I don't know where that is. Like, go into the.

Oh, my God.

Look through eight episodes and be like, where is this line?

That's so funny.

Yeah. There's also. If you. If you sort this stuff alphabetically, it's really funny because there are a couple of characters that are like, bit characters, bartender, cardinal, guard, rook, stuff like that. That doesn't have a the in front of it. But literally most of them are the something. The something.

The something.

It really throws that off.

I bet your stats are fascinating for this project.

Some of them are. It's really funny to see that, like, the. Like the changeling who's only going to be in one episode is going to have more words to say than the pillar, probably at this point.

I mean, the Internal narration really, really.

Racks that stuff up. When somebody is just like, talking and describing the scene, it really goes in. But for somebody who's going to appear basically in one episode, to have more words than somebody who is in basically all of the other episodes. Yeah. That shows the power of narration.

Of narration. Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, I should have figured out how many times I swore. I could have gotten the number of times I swore because I want the swear count.

You got to give me the swear count, Scott.

I'd have to re. Export everything.

But do it at the end.

Yeah, right. At the end. Like, this is the number of times we said fuck.

I want to know the number of times we said fuck.

It's an important statistic.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, I guess we will start in on our goals for the next couple of weeks. As tradition, I will go first. I would. Two weeks. I would really love to have this neck, this episode drafted. At the end of two weeks, I feel like my momentum is relatively on pace to just about do that, if not be close. So that's kind of my. That's where I want to be. I want to be the majority of the way through that. I've been forcing myself to write a little bit every day. And that helps a lot where it's like, even if you get like one sentence done, it's like, that's still movement. Let's just do it.

Yeah. And you kept up the momentum from the previous day. That's important.

Yeah, exactly. So, like, it. It keeps going and then. Yeah. So, yeah, I want to. In two weeks, I want to have that. If I could have it done, that will be fantastic. I will settle for nearly done.

Okay, nice.

All right.

So is it Sam or Jack this week? This time?

Well, it's both of us, probably a little bit of both. Because we do want to do. We want to sit down and do notes, right?

Mm.

Yeah. So that's. That's me. I guess the goal is going to be to in some way get my notes to Jack. Whether it be I'm just going to write it all down and send it to them in a DM or an email. Or maybe we can possibly find a time when we're not doing 10,000 things to actually chat about it. I think we actually need to chat about it because what I. It's sort of complex what I want to talk about. And I. I don't know. I don't want to write it down. I don't want to write it down. I don't want to write it down. I don't want to do it sometime.

In the next two weeks. I bet we can find half an hour to sit down on the phone and discuss, and that's what needs to.

Happen, because there's structural things before we can move on, and. Yeah, that's probably it.

Okay, so our homework is to sit down and talk with our mouths, with each other.

Find the time. All right, Interiori, how about you?

Well, you know, I would love my goal to be more social and talk to my friends, but unfortunately, I think that's gonna be, like, you know, in opposition to what I need to do, which is to get my next episode written, because it's been over a month since I should have done it, and times are ticking.

So.

Yes, so I'll be doing that. I'll also be going through my pilot script trying to figure out which characters Sam wanted to play and then just removing them from the show because I don't want to get into that situation where I'm like, no, Sam, I don't.

Want you in this.

I'm sorry.

I don't want you in this.

If I can remove the character, we're not gonna have that problem. So.

Perfect, perfect.

Just erase them. No, no. We're gonna have to have a discussion about that, my friend. You're gonna have to tell me at some point. You can't keep me in the dark.

Did you listen to the whole episode where we talked about, like, how difficult?

Yes, I did. I did very much so.

To do this.

Yeah. And it was nice as well, because I miss actually just listening to the show and not having to hear me ramble on. So it was actually really, really pleasant. Actually, it was cool.

It is fun. When you're normally on the episodes and then, like, one comes out, you're like, ooh, a special treat for me.

Fresh content.

I didn't know I was in it. It's great.

So funny.

Yes. So, yeah. Yeah, I gotta knuckle down and gonna get this. This next one done and prove to myself that my first script wasn't just a one off, that I can actually do it.

But, yeah, we're all nodding and thumbs up in the video.

Yeah, they're all being very supportive.

Actively supporting other than literally is what this entire thing is about. That's my job. Yeah.

Literally.

Literally to support each other. Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah. So we will catch y' all in two weeks. And again, if anybody is or knows somebody who, like, sings and plays guitars or maybe could do a little bit of songwriting, I need your help. So contact me, and I'll and that's it. Buh. Bye.

Bye.

Okay. Website. Library.horse. patreon. Patreon.com CurseKnowledge and we'll see you guys in two weeks. Anyway, bye.

Sam.