Unfuck Your Wordcount
Project: Unnamed Christmas story
Market: Storm Moon Press, "22 Days of Yule" open anthology call
Deadline: October 15, 2012
Required length:15-20K
Previous wordcount: 7918
New words written today: 1568 that are actual narrative
Present total wordcount: 10048 if you include the outline I put in
Mean things: Rockingham's Grandmama is a right bitch sometimes
Fun things: Rockingham's Grandmama is a right bitch sometimes
Stimulants: The smug glow of responsibility that comes from not neglecting laundry or dishes, and far too much tea
Reason for stopping: Brain's kinda done, and I owe lainathiel a LOT of commentary
Most people, I am given to understand, write their outline before they write the story.
I have yet to be able to do so.
I know my characters, and I know my setting, and I generally have an idea of what needs to happen in the story as a CONCEPT, but it's certainly not scene-by-scene at that point.
If I try to write an outline at that point, I wind up concluding that I have hopeless writer's block.
What seems to work is if I wind up the characters and put them through their paces on an ordinary day, around when I think the Plot Thing will happen. And I start inching towards it, one painful 20-minute sprint after another. Or 100-word written?kitten! chunks, sometimes. But my current method is just Unfucking My Wordcount in 20/10s.
Usually, at some point when I'm vamping around like that, waiting for the plot to come 'round on the git-tar, as Arlo Guthrie would say, my id will kick in and insist on supplying me with a sex scene. Or two. In rather a lot of detail. And if I don't write it down, I get NOTHING else done.
So then I go back to inching towards the plot, now knowing that there is Plot scheduled between wherever I am then and the Sex Scene. Which is a nice incentive, because I very much want to hook the sex scene into its sequential place in the narrative.
jAnd I keep doing that, and eventually I catch the plot and start reeling it in, and the pace picks up, and all of a sudden I know What Happens Next. For all values of Next. So, when I reach a nice stopping point in my dialogue-and-narrative words for the day, I stick a whole lot of short sentences and sentence fragments in list form after where I stopped. With fully-written sex scenes interrupting them.
And that's my outline.
In the novel, it wasn't just sex scenes that I was hooking in, but Emotionally Dramatic Moments as well. My brain likes writing from the emotional centers outward.
And I didn't get the novel outline all at once like that, either. But I got SECTIONS of it like that, with bits I had to drag out in timed chunks until the Outline thing happened again.
This is a very weird process, I think.
But it gets me Story. This entry was originally posted at http://julian-griffith.dreamwidth.org/15099.html and has
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