NaNo Extended: Plot Lines
I stopped talking about the novel, because a) it was past NaNo, b) I read a post saying that writing about writing only took away the time from the actual writing, and c) I accidentally led myself into a ditch, because I was rereading my old notes and realised I forgot a central theme of my old novel: humans have to be saved from their own imagination. Because imagination, like fire, is a good servant but a bad master.
But on the flipside, I tend to read a lot of DW/LJ/blog posts when writing, and sometimes they help to unstick things in my brain. Then, because I forgot where I read it I can't explain how they got unstuck (see: the thing I mentioned two posts ago.)
So I thought I'd write this down before I forgot. I was reading a complaint about generic mermaid plots, which was broadly described as the following: " [girl who doesn't fit in] [meets mysterious boy] [discovers she must save an undersea kingdom]".
Since I was working on the novel, I immediately went to compare my current plotline to this. It fits the first two, [girl who (somewhat) doesn't fit in (at funky workplace dealing with dreams)][meets mysterious boy (at funky workplace)]. But on the last part, my heroine doesn't exactly save anything, not even the mysterious boy. In fact, she's a little responsible for temporarily breaking reality...
Then I realised that I could take the "inherent" traits in heroines of mermaid tales (or even princess tales) - traits of royal/mermaid/royal mermaid blood and honour and beauty and grace (how much these are linked are up to the author) - which the heroine forgot/didn't know about, and twist it a little. My heroine could have put a little too much spark of life into one of her previous dreams and forgotten about it... and now she has to fix her mistake.
At least, this is how the idea formed in my head. We'll see how it executes in the story itself.
But on the flipside, I tend to read a lot of DW/LJ/blog posts when writing, and sometimes they help to unstick things in my brain. Then, because I forgot where I read it I can't explain how they got unstuck (see: the thing I mentioned two posts ago.)
So I thought I'd write this down before I forgot. I was reading a complaint about generic mermaid plots, which was broadly described as the following: " [girl who doesn't fit in] [meets mysterious boy] [discovers she must save an undersea kingdom]".
Since I was working on the novel, I immediately went to compare my current plotline to this. It fits the first two, [girl who (somewhat) doesn't fit in (at funky workplace dealing with dreams)][meets mysterious boy (at funky workplace)]. But on the last part, my heroine doesn't exactly save anything, not even the mysterious boy. In fact, she's a little responsible for temporarily breaking reality...
Then I realised that I could take the "inherent" traits in heroines of mermaid tales (or even princess tales) - traits of royal/mermaid/royal mermaid blood and honour and beauty and grace (how much these are linked are up to the author) - which the heroine forgot/didn't know about, and twist it a little. My heroine could have put a little too much spark of life into one of her previous dreams and forgotten about it... and now she has to fix her mistake.
At least, this is how the idea formed in my head. We'll see how it executes in the story itself.