Highway to the Danger Zone
I think one of my biggest fears with my year-long writing slump was coming out of it only to realized I’ve digressed. The past week has shown otherwise. Always my problem with writing was the organization–making outlines I never looked twice at, creating character sketches I never applied. I left all the work to massive multi-page free writes that while sometimes fun, can get hideously tedious when you do them for months on end. I effectively have 40 pages of those from the summer when I was conceptualizing Twice Born. Half of it is pure shit and was very forced–trying to come up with ideas for the sake of shaking off the slump.
With this new endevour, which is still untitled (and probably will be for a while) , I’ve done the exact opposite. All the development was done by sitting down at the keyboard and actually writing until I reached a point where it’d be dangerous to go any more. Not that writing is particularly dangerous. In fact, the last week has been the most fun I’ve probably ever had with a project. This is partially because of the story’s nature and partially because of the new methods I’ve been employing. Instead of going, “oh hey, I have an idea, lets free write,” I went, “oh, I have an idea–let’s write!” and thus churned out a chapter.
What makes continuing dangerous is the same reason Salamander failed and why I actually finished Hellion. When I wrote Salamander, I intended it to be short–no more than 50-100 pages, max. My chapters were designed for that and ran about two to four very crammed pages. So when the story grew past 60 pages and I hadn’t reached the ignition point yet, I realized this was probably going to turn into a full book. That’s where I made my mistake. See, up until that point, I had an idea of where the story was going. I did, after, too, but I didn’t take the time to firm up what I already had, or laid a road map. Most importantly, things kept changing. Over the course of writing, I found myself struggling with inventing characters on the spot and dealing with their development of the ones I’d had since the first page. See, I need to know my characters pretty well before I set out past that point of ignition. Not only does it making creating and developing those new characters easier, but you spend less time going, “wait–is this person acting like a human being?” That, and things feel more solid.
I don’t intend to make that mistake with this project, so I’m going to be stopping for a time and focus on the very banal task of developing character and plot and look into the possibility of a sequel (Needed? Not needed?).
Somehow, over the course of a year of blathering, that process got easier. Instead of working with a pile of unorganized notes and freewrites, I’ve got three separate plans–character, chapter plan and outline. Given that I’m setting this up as an online series, I can spend my day writing, stop, look at the stuff in my outline (organized by scenario/scene, or possible point of view) and put it into the “rough” part of the chapter plan. It takes a grand total of fifteen minutes if you already have a working outline, and it’s a pretty simple thing to do at the end of a writing day. That way, you’re putting the structure in motion rather than building it up as you go. The only thing that worries me about this is when I actually hit my stride, how I’ll be able to keep up this chapter plan without slaughtering trees, as I intend to keep things in a binder (I find juggling multiple documents on a computer to be monumentally annoying).
In other news, I’m working on getting a job, and school has started again. My schedule is awesome. Four day weeks, three day weekends, a class a day on Wednesday/Thursday. At least until I find work, this will be heaven ^_^