Working From Your Future

By J.T. Evans

When faced with a deadline, many people wait until the "crunch" at the end to get things done. This usually involves sleepless nights, loads of caffeine, and stressed out nerves. There's a way around this. I call it "working from your future." In essence, don't front-load the work or put it off until the last minute. The best route is to make steady forward progress.

I'm going to borrow from my software engineering background for this post. When faced with a large project on a deadline and a list of features to code, I use the following method to ensure I make the release date imposed upon me. Here's how I approach large projects in writing (and pretty much everything else in my life): 

1. Find your deadline date.
2. Find today's date.
3. Do the math and figure out how many days you have to accomplish your goal.         
4. List the steps necessary to finish the work. (Outlining, research, world building, character building, photos, maps, writing, etc.)
5. Assign a number of days (or hours if you want to get that detailed) on how long it will take you to finish each item in the list. Don't fret too much over the days/hours assigned. They're flexible (to an extent), and are just there to assist you in planning.         
6. Do the math and figure out if your workload (as measured by time) will fit into the number of days you have to accomplish the entire project. 

If you don't have enough time to finish the project by the deadline, you have a decision to make: 

• You can ask for an extension to the deadline. Asking your editor/publisher earlier (rather than later) for extra time will give you some goodwill and might lead to an extension.
• You can look at your list of tasks and see if you can drop something. In other words, do you really need that detailed map of the world for your writing? If not, drop it.
• You can also look at your list of tasks and see if you can shave a few days/hours off of an item or three by doing a little bit less work on them. Sometimes, you plan for a deep research dive that isn't necessary. Just hitting the surface details of something is sufficient to get you started.

Once you have the list figured into a time period that will fit your deadline, then you need to order your list in what must be done before other things. Obviously, things like research and outlining should come before the actual writing. The best thing to do is to work from the future. Put the final act of work (writing) at the end of the list. Put the item with most dependencies just above the final item. In other words, you'd probably put outlining right above writing, and then photos above that, and then world/character building above that, and so on. Research is usually the first thing on the list. By building the list from the bottom-up, you can figure out the order in which things must be done.

Keep in mind, this is how my brain works. Your list may look much different from my own. Do what works for you. Just give the framework a try. Plan the last thing you want to do and work from the future to today. You may be surprised how such a weird way of looking at things will free you up. By taking a project (e.g.: research, plan, develop, and write a novel in three months), and chopping it up into consumable sizes, you'll be really surprised how much less stress you'll experience.

I hope this helps you plan your future projects! Let me know how this works out for you in the comments below.


About the Author: J.T. is a writer of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. He has been actively been writing since he discovered a local writers group in 2006. He joined the Pikes Peak Writers in late 2008 and attended his first conference in 2010. In that time, he has worked his way up the ranks in Pikes Peak Writers from "chair mover" and "auction guard" to webmaster and president of the organization. He has a story published in An Uncommon Collection, and is expecting two more short stories to be published soon. He is working on his second fantasy series, and will push the first book from the proverbial nest when it is ready.

Writing Theme-Based Stories

By DeAnna Knippling


I know there are writers who hate theme. As an idea. They hate it. The idea of having to have a theme is a shackle on their creativity; it’s a burden that former English majors have thrown onto their shoulders like a dead camel: smelly, heavy, and full of fleas. They cast off theme and run giggling into the wilds of story. If their work has theme it’s because the readers put it there...the fools. Why ruin a perfectly good story with theme?

Okay, most writers aren’t like that - they just leave theme alone and let it take care of itself. If some theme wanders in, great, but they’re not going to worry about it beforehand.

Me, I like theme.

Sometimes I let it come up on its own, but sometimes I sit down at the keyboard with something thematic to say, dang it, and I’m not going to avoid consciously using theme just because some writers get the heebie-jeebies over it.

Why would I bother? Because I need to add “depth” to my stories?

Uh, no.

Sometimes I’m in the grip of a strong emotion. I wrote one story because someone had cheesed me off by writing about a Magic Indian character with no function in the story but to solve a (I think) white character’s problems.

“Magic Indian, I’ll show you a Magic Indian,” says I. Then I sat down to write a story, because that’s what you do when someone is wrong on the Internet. Whether it was a wise project to take on, I couldn’t say, but the theme is what made me write the story.

I wrote another project, not in the grip of an overwhelming passion, but to answer a question. The question wasn’t a particularly nice one: “Why would a guy kill his spouse for leaving him?” Another maybe not-so-wise project, but that’s what I do.

The point being that theme doesn’t have to be a set of shackles. It doesn’t have to be something you paste artificially onto your story nor does it have to grow naturally out of your story. You can sit down with a theme in mind and run with it.

You can even write by the seat of your pants with theme (I’ve been doing this a lot lately). The Anti-Magic Indian story ended up taking me back into unpleasant childhood memories, to find sympathy for a person I barely remembered and had totally taken for granted at the time. The theme of story started out with anger, but ended with regret. The other story, the domestic violence one, made me realize that need and fear and loss of self were at the core of what motivated my character. I couldn’t condone his actions, but I knew him. It scared me. It was one of my earlier stories, and I didn’t think at the time that monsters were supposed to be sympathetic. Not like that.

Okay, fine.

So how do you write a theme-based story? I don’t want to go into too much depth, because, really, there are a million ways to write any story. But some of my helpful mental tools for writing them are these:

• When you set up your character, setting, and problem, make each of the elements relate to your theme. That is, if you’re writing about family, make sure the characters have families, or don’t have families, or have messed-up families, or have failed their families. Make sure the setting is a family home, or a million miles away from one...so on. Make the opening problem about family, wanting one, having one and hating it, etc. 
• If you use trite examples of your theme, your story’s probably going to be trite. A story starting out with a housewife whose kids don’t like her pie is probably not going to interest people - even if she goes after people with an axe for always being on a die-et. 
• Instead of a statement theme, like “you need a family to survive,” ask a question: “Do we need families to survive?” The best answers aren’t “yes” or “no,” but “It depends; let me tell you about this one time...” 
• If you like mapping out character motivations, this one’s for you. Don’t just map out your character’s internal and external journeys. Map out the scenes like each one’s a point in a debate or argument related to your theme. If your theme is “reading expands your world,” then first show a world without reading and the efforts of the characters to solve their problems without reading. Then expose the characters to reading and have them mock it, reject it. Then show the characters getting in a situation where the thing they mocked could have prevented or quickly resolved the problem, etc. The problem with this one is that it can quickly settle into our blind spots, and take a lurch for the preachy. However, you may need to do it once or twice anyway to get a feel for the idea of theme as a kind of subplot or story within the story. (There’s nothing wrong with trying a technique a couple of times, then abandoning the conscious use of it - it’ll come out when you write if you’re meant to be using it.) 
• Let go and trust yourself. Theme is a kind of secret story within your story; it rises and falls, it tries and fails. If you let yourself follow your irrational urges to go off-outline (or completely off-topic, for pantsers), you might find yourself in a little eddy of theme, working itself out, making your story richer and truer. 

Theme doesn’t have to be dry; it doesn’t have to be forced. You can force it, of course. You might even want to your first couple of times working with it consciously, even though it’ll feel fake, the way trying any new technique feels fake. Theme can be driven by emotion; it can take you places you (and the reader) would never guess. Theme doesn’t have to be a blank on your outline that you “should” fill out; it doesn’t have to be an artificial spice that you add to give your story “depth,” but really just keeps you from the real work of developing the story. You definitely don’t have to add the same amount with every story, either.

In short, there’s no reason to fear theme. It’s just another tool for your toolbox. Okay, maybe sometimes people use it like a chainsaw, but you don’t have to. You can use it like a fine-detail brush instead. Or a ratchet...to tighten the nuts and bolts underneath the chassis.


About the Author: DeAnna Knippling started freelancing in May 2011 and wouldn’t be able to do it without her wonderful family and friends, especially her husband. In fact, she owes a lot to Pikes Peak Writers for helping her be a better writer, especially through the Write Brains, both in the lectures and in meeting lots of other writers.

Her reason for writing is to entertain by celebrating her family’s tradition of dry yet merry wit, and to help ease the suffering of lack of self-confidence, having suffered it many years herself. She also likes to poke around and ask difficult questions, because she hates it when people assume something must be so.

For more kicks in the writerly pants, see her blog at www.deannaknippling.com or her ebook How to Fail & Keep on Writing, available at Smashwords, B&N, Amazon, and OmniLit.