Vibe Writing - страница 2

A Quick Story: The Second Day Dead End

With the reader’s permission, I want to step back and tell a personal story. It will explain why we’re starting this book not with launching a neural network, but with seemingly boring schemes.

It was 2016.

I got my hands on the famous book by Chris Baty – founder of the NaNoWriMo movement (“Write a Novel in a Month”). Baty wrote so inspiringly, so convincingly: “Just write! Plot isn’t needed! The main thing is drive!”

I believed. I was swept up by inspiration. It seemed to me that over the long years of life, so many stories, observations, and wisdom had accumulated in my head that they’d be enough for a three-volume set. They were just bursting to come out.

I approached it seriously. Took a vacation in November. Registered for the official NaNoWriMo marathon. Sat down at the keyboard, ready to pour all my life experience onto paper.

And I started writing.

The first day passed in euphoria. I typed like a machine gun.

The second day passed a bit harder.

And by the evening of the second day, something terrible happened.

I stopped.

All the “brilliant thoughts” and “interesting cases” I’d been collecting for years suddenly… ran out. Stories that seemed like an endless ocean in my head turned into a tiny puddle on paper. I looked at the monitor and realized with horror: I’m empty. My hero is standing in the middle of a room, and I have no idea where he should go or why.

It was an absolute dead end. The vacation had just begun, but the novel was already dead.

Salvation came from an unexpected place.

In an online writing community, I found a thread where experienced writers shared their methods. There sat the same madmen as me, but among them were “veterans.” I complained about my block. And instead of saying “just keep writing,” the community members threw me links to the right books.

That’s when, in 2016, I learned the secret that turned my consciousness upside down.

It turns out, a novel is not a stream of consciousness. A novel has Structure.

This “skeleton” of a story wasn’t invented in Hollywood. It was invented by the ancient Greeks sitting in amphitheaters. Aristotle called it “Peripeteia,” we call it a “Plot Arc.” But the essence is the same: it’s the mathematics of emotions that has worked for 2,000 years.

If you don’t have structure, you don’t get a novel, but at best a disjointed set of essays. If you try to break structure “for creativity’s sake,” you get heavy arthouse that only the author and two critics understand, but which an ordinary person will close on page ten.

Without structure – there will be no novel. Not with a neural network, not without it.