Introduction to The Fiction Method
Who am I, what is the purpose, and what is the plan
If you are reading this, welcome! If you decide to stop reading this, I will not blame you. I am not sure how much I could take of myself, if I had a choice. Still, it seems a fair idea to introduce myself and this latest project of mine.
My name is Jim Pitchford and I enjoy writing stories. At the time I’m writing this, I have written five novels, all self-published and a whole one of them has ever been purchased and read. That does not bother me because I enjoy the storytelling itself. Still, it would be nice if I could get some readers, and this Substack, along with the associated The Fiction Method YouTube channel, have been created partly to that end. At times I may be speaking about or directly promoting a story, and talking about story telling and writing in general, but other times it might just be for me to have fun sharing other things. That really will depend on how things go and what develops.
So why name this “The Fiction Method?” The original suggestion given to me was for a YouTube channel to discuss some of the science fiction I have written. I do not just mean the stories but the actual science and technology I use within the stories, because I will spend the time to think through how they can work. This allows me to better explain them in the writing, and better use them in the story. For this reason, I wanted a title that would somehow relate to science, but I also did not want to limit myself to science fiction, as I will write whatever genre the story wants to be. What finally came to me was “The Fiction Method,” a play on “the scientific method” to serve as a relation to science, but is also broad enough to cover whatever genre I am working within. I think it is a fair name, but I can only hope it is not a bad one as I am stuck with it.
In addition to the types of posts mentioned above, there is another type I want to try writing, but, as with all things, it will depend on how things go. For a couple reasons I like the idea of keeping a kind of public writing journal. While I will try to avoid spoilers, my intention with those posts will be to share specific elements and experiences from the process of writing a story. Perhaps others will find this interesting, but I wish to have such a record for myself as well, and that may deserve an explanation.
I do not know how common this is for writers, but even if it is something shared by all of us, I still consider myself thankful for how my stories will speak to me. To not sound quite as crazy, perhaps a better way to describe the experience is I have a relationship with my stories, and thereby their characters, and like a relationship with a real person, I will hear them even when they are not there. While writing Failure this manifested twice, at least; in one case a character being bothered by how angry I had written them, and in the other characters asked what happened during a day I originally had no plans to write about. In the former case I rewrote a chapter, and in the latter I wrote multiple new chapters, and the story was better for having done so every time.
More recently, in The Children of Many Gifts, the sequel to Failure, I had times when I knew what I wanted to be the next key event, but I wanted to delay them, so I would ask the story what to do. It would respond by suggesting I revisit some minor character I had not spoken to for a bit, or that some event was reasonable to occur within the protagonist’s life, so write that. Again, the story is better for this, but I cannot tell these chapters apart from the others, which is good, but I wish I could distinguish them for when I talk about the story.
These are the reasons I want to keep and share such a journal. I want to share these stories of the process, rather than keeping them as something I might share with a friend or, more likely, I may forget about.
That and it can help keep me honest in my work. To provide what are almost reports on my writing, that means I must have written something. It might not be much, especially as I do not believe in setting some kind of quota for this type of work, but there must be something to share.
Now, before closing this out I want to talk about email addresses, which may seem an odd thing to discuss, but there is a purpose to it. (Something you may come to learn about me is my love in technologies and joy in sharing different interesting aspects of them.) Part of the specification of email addresses is something called “+ addressing.” Though it is supposed to be a standard, I suspect many people are unfamiliar with it, but the way it works is anything after a ‘+’ in an email address is ignored for the routing. Using the address I put in my books, “scifubook@gmail.com” and “scifubook+TFM@gmail.com” will both go to the same inbox.
What is the use for this? Even though the emails all come to the same inbox, the original To address will remain different. This helps with filtering emails, which means you could put a “+TFM” or similar in the email address you use to subscribe (assuming you do) and then set a filter to direct the emails wherever you wish, such as a separate folder or directly to the trash. I try to keep my email very organized, so this is a pretty useful feature to me, and I hope it can be for you as well.
One final thing to end this on, and that is how one can support me, if that is ever a desire. The best way is to buy one of my books, which you can find here: Jim Pitchford Amazon Author Page. It might not be as strong a return as other methods, but until I know there is sufficient interest, I see no reason to bother investigating any others (including subscriptions on Substack).