verbage: space
Jul. 11th, 2010 11:07 pmWords: call it 500
Total words: 2566
Neat things: A ship of silver and starlight. An AI that's just smart enough to come to terms with being an AI instead of a person.
I spent the last two weeks beating my head against this, in the same way that I was beating my head against "Junkyard Dog" towards the end of last year. I sort of knew what I had to write next, but I didn't know what it was setting up for, and suddenly that mattered.
Last weekend I sat down and worked out a backstory and a motivation for the aliens. That helped some; I felt like I was about ready to start writing again. (Then life intervened.) Today I still wasn't ready to start writing new stuff, and on top of that the plot I'd worked out made no sense. I went back through and rewrote some of what I'd already written to change a few key details about the world. That didn't help.
Then I said "screw it, i know pretty well what i want the last scene to be, i'll write that because at least that's writing something." And about thirty words into the scene I had an epiphany, and then I had a plot.
And now I have a pretty good idea of what the rest of the scenes for this are going to be (there's some uncertainty around the climax, which is all for the better), and I've mostly written the scene I was stuck on and part of the next.
This is another one of those damned things I'm not good enough yet to write. Characters who are flawed and sympathetic and real enough that the audience cares about their fate are pretty much vital to this story working, and I don't know that I can pull that off yet.
Oh well. The only way to learn how to do that is to try.
Total words: 2566
Neat things: A ship of silver and starlight. An AI that's just smart enough to come to terms with being an AI instead of a person.
I spent the last two weeks beating my head against this, in the same way that I was beating my head against "Junkyard Dog" towards the end of last year. I sort of knew what I had to write next, but I didn't know what it was setting up for, and suddenly that mattered.
Last weekend I sat down and worked out a backstory and a motivation for the aliens. That helped some; I felt like I was about ready to start writing again. (Then life intervened.) Today I still wasn't ready to start writing new stuff, and on top of that the plot I'd worked out made no sense. I went back through and rewrote some of what I'd already written to change a few key details about the world. That didn't help.
Then I said "screw it, i know pretty well what i want the last scene to be, i'll write that because at least that's writing something." And about thirty words into the scene I had an epiphany, and then I had a plot.
And now I have a pretty good idea of what the rest of the scenes for this are going to be (there's some uncertainty around the climax, which is all for the better), and I've mostly written the scene I was stuck on and part of the next.
This is another one of those damned things I'm not good enough yet to write. Characters who are flawed and sympathetic and real enough that the audience cares about their fate are pretty much vital to this story working, and I don't know that I can pull that off yet.
Oh well. The only way to learn how to do that is to try.