When I decided that I wanted to approach writing again I had some problems I needed to solve.
The first was that I didn’t want to write for film anymore. I knew that I wasn’t going to chase filmmaking or try to get scripts optioned. I was never terribly big on selling my scripts and filmmaking simply isn’t a discipline that I love enough to fight through the scrappy years to get to the good to ones.
The next problem was I had spent the last thirty years writing almost exclusively for film. In terms of creating a narrative and telling a compelling story, the knowledge I gained writing for film transfers over. The style absolutely does not.
When writing for film you can’t (realistically shouldn’t) write anything that can’t be displayed on screen. A character’s internal state needs to be made external. Sure, you can have a voice over that explains what the character is thinking or feeling, but it often doesn’t land well and tends to be frowned upon. What the character is thinking and feeling needs to be made concrete through their actions or words. It needs to bleed out into the situations and environments. If you can’t see it or hear it, it doesn’t exist.
My experience with writing prose is minimal.
The Patreon Singles Releases project consists of posting a new story to my Patreon on a loose weekly schedule (aiming for weekly, hard limit of bi-weekly). The goal for these is to write and share a self contained piece of flash fiction. It is an attempt to solve several problems at once.
Getting in the Reps
The first is simply getting in the reps. I have a strong grasp of screenplay writing and I understand my voice in that medium. I don’t have the same understanding when writing prose. By committing to writing and releasing a small, complete bit of writing every week, I’m forcing myself to write pages that I think, at minimum, are approaching a level worth sharing with others. It’s a trial by fire where I either produce or flame out entirely.
The best way that I can think to internalize the conventions and features of prose is to write it. To write a lot of it. Through that writing I will find my voice and build my style.
Building a Corpus
As a screenwriter I wrote at least two dozen feature length screenplays and well over fifty shorts. I built a lot of knowledge and habits over that time that can directly translate to writing prose. It means I can build a similar body of work in the form of short stories and novels.
There is a part of me that has always felt like there’s an endless fountain of words available. No matter how much I write, I will never be done writing. There will always been new characters to meet and stories to explore. I want to get as much of that out of me as I can before I lose the capability to do so.
What I want is work that appropriately matches that endless fountain. Not for the sake of pumping out page after page, but for harnessing the fountain to tell stories to the best of my capacity. A body of work that I am proud of. The breadth of which includes a variety of voices and perspectives. Stories that will ultimately support the larger projects down the road.
And, you know, not for nothing, but proving to myself that I can. I move my way through the world as a perpetual imposter. I have spent so much time starting things just to abandon them after a few weeks or months. The doubt would creep in and I would quit rather than face the possibility of what seemed like inevitable failure. I know that I’m capable. The only thing stopping me from proving it is time and follow through.
Finding an Audience
I know that I have some distinct sensibilities and that they are not necessarily mainstream. I’m not looking to wrap my writing around what I expect a mainstream audience would be interested in. I didn’t audience chase with screenwriting, I’m certainly not going to do it here.
What I’m looking for is the audience for my writing. I’m not some special and unique flower that is so distinct that no one could ever possibly understand my writing, let alone enjoy it. I know there are people who would be interested in my style and subject matter. By writing broadly, while sticking to my voice, I am creating more opportunities to find that audience.
Finding a Financial Platform
I don’t want to gate my writing behind Patreon tiers or purchases. If I want to find a place where I can reasonably write full time, I need a financial platform to work from. While it’s a minimal step forward, creating epubs for each of these stories creates a small incentive for members of all paid tiers. This incentive is retroactive, as all previous releases are available to paid members, and continues into the future as I write more.
It is a baseline to start from as I work to find more ways to interact with and reward a community.
I can also see a future where I make collections of these stories and market those under more traditional means.
Patreon and Ways to Contact Me
If you’re reading this and haven’t been to my Patreon yet, you can find it here: patreon.com/DavidBragg