verbage: space
Jul. 11th, 2010 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishWords: 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.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-12 11:10 am (UTC)Yay for words-on-page!
no subject
Date: 2010-07-12 01:25 pm (UTC)I'm finding that I can't write without knowing where the story can go (which is not the same thing as knowing where the story /will/ go, and is why I can start things: because there are a zillion different places the story can go and I get to find out which one it wants to be). I run smack into a brick wall of not being able to put words down. In this case I even knew what the next two scenes are (and still are, they haven't really changed except for the removal of a character from the first of them), and I couldn't write them until my subconscious was happy with what it was using them to set up for.
Character I'm a lot more iffy on. I suppose I can always use rewrites to give them some pathos. :)
And, yeah. It's good to be writing again.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-12 03:28 pm (UTC)Much as I hate to admit it, there are definitely merits to using your first draft as an outline for the second. Character... I still find this discussion of voice fascinating, although of course that's only part of it.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-12 07:19 pm (UTC)I detest the thought of having to throw away large portions of what I've written, on the grounds that it took a great deal of effort to get it written in the first place and I'd like to have something to show for it. That doesn't mean it's not going to turn out to be the best way to write any given thing.
That is a highly useful post on voice. Mostly I can do the police in different voices except when I'm struggling with something else, or going too fast to get to the end of the scene, or just being lazy. Which is to say that consciously thinking about (in?) the voice of each character is probably a good thing to be doing.