Writing Output and Dumb Aliens

Here’s a very useful article on planning and productivity in the writing life, by Karen Wiesner:

Writing Productivity

My main reaction is awe at her output. She breaks down her annual schedule week by week and makes it sound so easy. Of course, she writes full time with no “day job,” but still. . . .

Since I’m a much slower writer than I’d like to be, I’m always searching for new techniques and tricks to overcome my inertia. Sort of like the way I used to accumulate books on housekeeping in hopes of finding the secret to getting the house clean with no effort. As a dedicated outliner, I’ve found Karen’s FIRST DRAFT IN 30 DAYS and FROM FIRST DRAFT TO FINISHED NOVEL to be phenomenally helpful and an excellent fit for my natural way of working.

But what I still want, ideally, is a magic word processor that would take my detailed outline and transform it into a first draft in my own style. I enjoy outlining and don’t mind polishing; unlike lucky authors such as Isaac Asimov, I don’t get much pleasure out of the actual, well, WRITING.

On an unrelated topic, I saw the alien abduction faux documentary THE FOURTH KIND last weekend. It impresses me as a good illustration of Jacqueline’s contrast between SF and horror. Despite the SF trope of extraterrestrial visitors, the movie’s mood is horror. The human characters remain helpless to do anything except investigate their terrible experiences, and even then gaps in their knowledge remain. They can’t learn much more than the aliens want them to know. The film has some scary moments, but aside from the exasperating lack of realism in the sheriff’s behavior (it’s supposed to take place in Nome, Alaska, which I’m sure operates like a real city, not a frontier outpost in the wilderness where police can do anything that strikes their whim) the aliens don’t make much sense when you think about them carefully, either. If they’ve been hanging around for thousands of years, as suggested by the dragging in of that tired “prehistoric alien visitors” notion with bas-reliefs from the ancient Middle East as evidence, shouldn’t they have learned more than enough about our species by now—too much to require the random snatching and vivisecting of ordinary human beings? More glaring, if they’re advanced enough to remove a child through a solid ceiling on a beam of light, why aren’t they smart enough to destroy the psychologist’s tape of her encounter with them? And surely cosmic beings of superhuman intelligence could figure out that if they don’t want humanity to learn about their existence, they should stay far away from the psychologist and her family, ensuring that nothing abnormal ever happens to them again—instead of kidnapping her daughter in a dazzling light show.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt