Bit of an update
It’s actually not much of an update… my life without TPO is sadly uninteresting. What can I say? I’ve always known that he was the more interesting one in our relationship.
I’ve been obsessing about each new episode of Living With the Machigenga (scarily obsessing, at that) and watching more episodes of Clean House than can possibly be good for my mental health.
On the work front… it’s… going. Gearing up for our busy period, which is always fun. Amazingly, I got the “Employee of the Quarter” award – I still don’t know how I accomplished that given the level of contempt I have for “certain people” I work with. I won’t elaborate, but… TRUST ME.
I know I am saying nothing interesting – at the moment, the most interesting things that are happening to me are imaginary. That’s not as pathetic as it sounds (and believe me – I am well aware of how pathetic that sounds) because the “imaginary-ness” is in the form of fiction writing. Yes, I have done much much editing on the script and have gotten excellent feedback on it1, but I’m also working on a couple new projects.
I’m trying a new approach to writing right now. In the past, I would write one scene or chapter (depending on what type of story I was writing) and then fill in the pieces of story that came both before and after that scene/chapter2. It might be the way I think. I’ll get an idea for a story element – usually one little piece of dialogue or one small bit of imagery – and then start exploring what was happening with those characters that led them to that moment… or what would happen to them immediately after that moment. So, I’ll write that scene or chapter and, from there, start outlining the basic elements of plot.
That was the old way. As you can well imagine (and if you’re a writer, as you have probably experienced yourself), that’s not a very efficient or effective way to write a story. What I’ve learned is that, if anything, that’s the surest way to keep a story in a perpetual half-written state on your hard-drive for years.
What I’ve been working on is doing a basic chapter-by-chapter (or, scene-by-scene, depending on the format) outline. From there, I’ve been detailing all of the elements that each chapter/scene needs to accomplish. As a side document, I write out details about each main character and their story arc(s) as well as detail some of the major locations if needed. It’s a lot of work to put into pre-writing, but I think it will eventually help the writing process in the long run. In the past, I’ve skipped the pre-writing and I can tell that old stories have suffered for it because I tend to get to a certain spot where I have no idea how to get the characters from where they are to where they need to be.
Ooops – I sort of went off on a tangent. This post was mostly just to say “hey – no G-news is good G-news.3”
- by “excellent” I don’t mean that people have been telling me non-stop how great it is… I mean that people have been taking time to point out things that I didn’t notice and could improve [↩]
- Very rarely would the particular scene/chapter I started with was the beginning of the story [↩]
- You are AWESOME if you know what that is from! [↩]
