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Sat down to write one page of backstory and lost 3 hours to a timeline I never needed
Last Tuesday I started a simple character sketch for a short story I have been kicking around since January. I wanted one paragraph about where she grew up, nothing fancy. Twenty minutes in I decided I needed to know what year it was, and that meant picking a city, and that meant researching what her neighborhood looked like in 1994. Next thing I know I have a spreadsheet with 40 rows of made up birthdays and a map of a town that does not exist. The actual paragraph is still 3 sentences long and I hate all 3 of them. My wife walked by at 11pm and asked why I was reading about bus routes in Ohio for a story set in Oregon. Does anyone else build a whole fake world just to avoid writing the one sentence that matters?
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oscarc124d ago
The "map of a town that does not exist" part got me. Here is the thing nobody talks about with this hobby, the fake town becomes a place you actually want to hang out in. You know the diner on 5th, you know which bus is always late, you know the guy who runs the hardware store. That town is fun and easy and nobody can judge it. The real story is scary because your character has to want something and then not get it, and that can just plain fail. A spreadsheet of birthdays never fails. So yeah, you are not avoiding writing, you are avoiding being bad at writing, which is a whole different thing and way harder to admit.
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