Lessons from The Outer Reaches

Alice T. Kat started as a marketing gimmick for a pizza place that never opened.

The idea was to write up a little adventure—or part of an adventure—every week and send it home on a coupon sheet that also included a space to draw and color a scene from that week's installment. When you turned in the drawing the next week, you'd get a bigger discount or a free 2-liter or something like that. The pictures would be posted in the store and eventually printed in an informal book, which would also be available for sale.

Like I said, the shop never opened, but Alice wouldn't go away. I decided to try to keep up a regular serial story to practice things like themes, settings, dialogue, characterization—all the essentials of good story-telling. The concept was that if those things are perfected, then the medium didn't matter. A good interesting story about a bunch of, say, space-faring cats, could be just as compelling as a tale where humans are the central characters.

Did it succeed? I'm not sure; you'll have to tell me.

I have learned a few things along the way, and enjoyed myself enough to continue it, anyway.

First, I was surprised to tally up the words in her first adventure and find that I had written nearly 16,000 of them. That reinforces a simple truth about writing: keep it up. Do something every day, even if it's just a few paragraphs or pages. Those paragraphs and pages add up and, even if the story itself doesn't amount to anything, the skills eventually will.

It is a bit disjointed in some places and the wording is a bit terse and awkward in others, but it's just a first draft. A draft is something you can fix, and a draft is something you can fix. In her book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott talks about the necessity—if not the virtues—of the sh*tty first draft. Simply put, you have to start somewhere and if writing about space cats and nationalistic (or should that be planetalistic?) Plutorian renegades gets you down at the desk every day, then so be it.

Finally, whatever you decide to write, make sure you get some kind of enjoyment out of it. Find a way to have fun. You'd think that would be the easy part, but it's not. Sitting down to write is not fun, not always, it is a job like any other and all the more difficult sometimes because there is often no paycheck—or even a chance of a paycheck—at the end of it.

Ultimately, if you don't have fun writing it, nobody will have fun reading it. So perhaps I'm a bit chagrinned because, out of all the concepts I've identified and thought about over the past several years the one I've chosen to make the most public probably has no defined market. There were still bits that I liked about it, some passages of dialogue, a couple of the titles (such as 'the mosquito and the porcupine') that may appear in some other form somewhere down the line. It's all practice, after all. Writing is one of those skills where quantity will ultimately bring quality.

Alice's first tale was about the dangers of pride and the way the labels we so callously put on other people—or beings—can cause a lot of damage. Her next, which exists only in the scrap of a few sentences in my mind right now, is a little broader, about how we look at and take comfort in things that most others either ignore or take for granted.

Thanks for reading and, especially for letting me know what you think so far. I'll see you in the Outer Reaches, and beyond.