Oh God, you groan, not another one? Well, yes. I need a break from all of my delightful (to me), neurotic (unquestionably) Tethyn characters and their penchant for getting into dire situations and saving the world. I want to write something fun, and a little bit silly, to stop taking this whole bloody project of writing so damn seriously for a while. I find myself worrying about this, if I am going to encourage bad habits by not even really trying to write something good?--but I'm going to write it anyway.
Some world-saving may ensue anyway. I seem to lean toward that sort of thing.
I have spent the past couple of weeks writing up an outline of sorts--mainly a list of set pieces I knew I wanted to include, stitched together by a few bare-bones requirements from my various genres--and writing up character backgrounds (for which those questionnaires included in some role-playing games are actually pretty useful), figuring out who these people were and how they were going to interact.
The first day, Sunday, was easy; I was up at 4:30 (stupid time change), and everyone else was out for the morning, so I blasted through the first few sections of my plot and ended up with more than 5,000 words. Monday was, of course, a bit more challenging--for one thing, I was exhausted--but I plugged away early on, and at lunch, adding enough to my total to keep me happy. We'll see how things go from here....
It did not occur to me until just this moment that basically what I did was write a doc plan for this novel--the exact same thing I do all the time at work.
ReplyDeleteThis strikes me as a very smart thing to do. That I didn't even realize it was what I was doing, strikes me as really dumb. I think I will call it "internalization of good writing habits" for my ego's sake.