Words/Time: 30 minutes finishing the introduction of Drear, the narrator of “Pithea.” I then added that to my story blog, Made in Pithea, and proceeded to make the first post. Granted, that first post was mostly a copy & paste of the introduction to “Pithea,” but it still took some time to get ready and post. I’m happy I’ve been able to find some light work to do during this busy week, and come Monday, it’ll be back to actual revision.
writing
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 9, 2015
Words/Time: 20ish minutes working on a character profile for a new blog I’m setting up. I’m going to split things related to writing as a whole (my daily challenge check-ins, new group of “Write Every Day” posts, NaNo-related things) or my personal posts apart from posts about my story–the world, characters, plots, etc. I’m moving all of the latter to a blog called “Made in Pithea.” I’m working on getting it up with some pages of information (mostly about the narrator, whose voice I will use for most, if not all, of the posts and about the world I have created) and at least one beginning post. Then I will slowly introduce more characters, explain more of the world, and maybe drop some actual story now and then. I’m kind of excited, yet acutely aware that I’m a major novice at design, so the blog will be very plain. I actually have an idea for a sort of main image for Pithea (both the country and the book), but I’m just not a graphic artist of any kind. So that’s still a faraway dream. Anyway, yay, I got stuff done! Now I need to sleep for another early morning.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 8, 2015
Words/Time: 25 minutes typing new text into the computer for “Pithea.”
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 7, 2015
Words/Time: 32 minutes adding revisions for “Pithea” that were made on paper into the computer.
I am planning for a lighter week this week. My church’s VBS program starts tomorrow, and I’m a volunteer. For 5 days, I will wake up early, transport my two kids and their two cousins to church, then spend 3 hours taking the 2nd & 3rd graders around to the different stations. I did this last year (though with the next age group down) and remember being exhausted all week. So the rest of the evenings this week, I will work on my writing if I am alert enough and have time, but if not, I won’t feel guilty.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 6, 2015
Words/Time: 1124 words, revising “Pithea.” Naolin’s delusional, sick mind is shown a few more times (wow, not sick in the way that sort of made it sound…like, actually sick–poisoned, in fact). Missy and Drear don’t act so hostilely toward each other now (though I should probably find a place for him to actually tell her his name), and a lot of Missy mixing healing items and giving the unconscious man liquid (since I discovered weeks ago that that doesn’t actually work) has been removed.
Dream Every Day: Revisiting High School
When I was in high school, I took a creative writing class. It’s the only one I’ve ever taken, and I couldn’t tell you how alike or different it was from other such classes. There was a process we went through before we ever started writing for the short story part of class that has stuck with me for fifteen years. It was a process of coming up with multiple story seeds, before then choosing the one we wanted to develop into a story. One day we were instructed to come up with a setting and character that didn’t really go together. For example, I chose a British soldier at a Minnesota lake. Under that, it says:
“Why–the queen of England decided she wanted a vacation in a secluded spot and he was assigned to guard the family.
Conflict–the people who live around there are secretive, don’t know why he’s there, and don’t want him there.”
The scenario sounds ridiculous to me now, and I never wrote any further with that idea. However, for some reason, this exercise has stuck with me for a long time.
On the other hand, what is just an innocuous picture–a field of wildflowers–became the short story I turned in for that class. A short story the teacher loved and helped me to remember that I enjoy writing (I had written a lot in elementary school, then abandoned it for poetry). In an essay in that class, though, I apparently wrote that I didn’t think I’d have much reason to write fiction again in the future. That was fun to dig up from my past.
This colorful, foggy field became the setting of a frenzied, fear-filled search for a briefcase and a race against time for the protagonist in the story I wrote from it.
At the same time I was taking this creative writing class, I had the same teacher for English class. In English, we would get vocabulary lists, and for every list, one assignment was always to write some sort of paragraph or short story that incorporated at least 5 of the vocab words. A few of those ended up being great sources of creativity for me. One, a one-page short story, my teacher said was written well enough and had good enough character development that I could have turned it in for my short story in creative writing.
The point of all of this is to say that, while inspiration can certainly come from anywhere and sometimes nowhere, it is possible to create ideas using various methods and stimuli. Images, sounds, prompts, word lists, outlandish character/setting combos, even story scenarios provided by someone else, can produce seeds that may or may not be worth developing. The key is to keep all of the potential seeds somewhere that can be referenced later. One important rule of writing–never throw anything out. You never know if you’ll want to be able to look back at it 15 years later and write a blog post about it.
Dream for yourself: If anyone reading this wants to try their hand at some of these story seed starters, I encourage you to look at the image above, describe it in vivid detail, and use it as a setting for a scene. Then see where that takes you. Or, use the following list of words to create a paragraph or two–it can be a setting, a short story, or even a scene from something larger. (Remember, it’s from a school vocab list. If you don’t know the words, look them up! Expanding your vocabulary can always help with writing too.) It doesn’t have to produce a full story–just spark an idea. If anyone does write anything from my suggestions, feel free to share with me! I’d love to see what others come up with.
noxious
sub rosa
tete-a-tete
parvenu
a capella
postprandial
minatory
venal
quid pro quo
Continue reading below to read the short story I created with the words above (if you’re considering writing from the list yourself, don’t read mine yet; it’ll skew your ideas).
Dream, plan, write…
This has been my motto for the last year. I have tried to make sure every day contains at least a little writing work. For me, this can take more than one form:
Dream – This is the part where you ask, “What if…?” and “Why?” What if space were filled with vampires? What if the guy was the one who needed rescuing? Why would a British royal guard be camping in the woods of Montana? How different would the world be without shrimp? There are ways to force these ideas out of your head, but just as often, they just come on their own. When you’re driving, washing dishes, showering, even sleeping.
Plan – This is where you take that idea, that seed, and run with it. Meet and flesh out the characters. Decide on the right time and place. Start plotting. Not everyone does this step; some skip right from dreaming to writing. That’s okay too. But for the rest of us, it’s important to spend some time in the planning stage.
Write – This is the most self-explanatory stage, but often the most difficult to do. It is helpful to set goals along the way. Also important is saving the editing for later.
Revise – This is my absolute least favorite stage, but it has to be done. The question, though, is how to do it and how much to revise. My own mindset on revising has changed a lot in the last year, and I think I’m hating it less than I used to.
These different stages are often mixed up. Currently, on any given day, I may be working on revising one of two books, plotting another one, writing for a shorter bit that has no real plans, or who knows what else. And I’m always dreaming.
I’ve come to realize recently that, though I am not a published author, I have a lot of experience as a writer. I’ve been writing with some seriousness for 10 years and have grown a lot in both knowledge and skill. I’ve finished the first draft of two novels, which I’m told is an accomplishment in itself. And just in the last two years, I have learned a lot about all of these stages of writing. This blog has always been focused on my writing progress, but I have decided it’s time to branch out. I want to start sharing some of what I’ve learned, even extending to areas outside of those I mentioned above (like finding the right writing atmosphere). Hopefully someone will find some usefulness in my words.
I won’t try to say when or how often these posts might come out, because my family life is too unpredictable. The first post, about the “Dream” stage, will be shortly following this introductory post though.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 5, 2015
Words/Time: 992 words, revising “Pithea.” I’m going to go into more detail on the actual story than I normally do here, so bear with me. The book I am working on right now is a full rewrite of 5 shortish stories that I wrote as fanfiction around 10 years ago. They were fanfiction based on a video game that had very little plot of its own, so the plots and characters were completely my own invention.
Cut to more recent years, and I’ve built a new world of my own that will mostly accommodate those stories, yet be different from the game (in some ways, very different). The original stories were written as third-person limited POV, while this book is actually first-person, but told from a side character who is only in the second half of the book (and even then, somewhat sporadically). The part of the story I am working on now is when the main character meets the narrator character for the first time.
Originally, it went that Missy (the MC) had already seen Drear (the narrator) from a distance, and he’d kind of creeped her out. So when she found him later, bent over her sick friend, she assumed the worst. And that led to situations in which she mistrusted him, and it made perfect sense.
In the rewritten book, I tried to keep that mistrust (and the mystery about Drear being the brother of that sick friend). But basically, Missy has to break into Drear’s house and then act indignant. Drear’s identity being a secret is really forced, and his subsequent reveal is just clumsy.
So, though I’m very used to these scenes being one way (Drear doesn’t identify himself and Missy has good cause to think he’s untrustworthy) for 10 years, I am now finding that I have to almost completely re-plot what happens from this point forward. There’s no reason Missy can’t know right away who Drear is (he introduces himself at the beginning of the book and says he’s the brother of that other character), so I’m basically going to be rewriting the next several chapters. Which is kind of nice, because I’ve been missing the actual writing lately.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 4, 2015
Words/Time: 1059 words, revising “Pithea.” Missy’s first meeting with Aeldrim and Selunya is less awkward and forced. I hope. I went back to the original version from years ago to find the parts that I liked and hopefully it flows better now.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 2, 2015
Words/Time: 1155 words revising “Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 42nd meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We finished the section on Pithean history that we started last week, which is a between-parts chunk of exposition. In the end, we felt pretty good about the whole thing, even though exposition is often thought of as boring. We do have a question about a really big issue that we will have to discuss further that will potentially break some of my world, but hopefully we can come to an answer that we like without ruining a foundational mechanic in my story world.
A Journey of Words 