"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all."
-Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

Friday, May 2, 2008

Bootstrapping My Writing, or Trying To

I'm taking a break from my projects, for now, and doing two new things to help get myself writing again.

The first is taking a new idea and experimenting with planning a book the organised way - from detailed character sheets to charting out my plot completely to determining my themes to blocking my scenes with all pertinent information - all before I start writing. For now, I'm calling the project "Isaiah" after one main character. I tend to be a largely organic writer, so I want to try this kind of process and see what I can learn from it. I'm also planning on blogging the process as I do it, so that I have a record of it later.

The second is a challenge on Forward Motion, a writing community started by Holly Lisle and maintained by Lazette Gifford. It's called "Story-a-Day" and, as the name implies, involves writing one short story every day for the month of May. You have to use the prompt generators given in the challenge, and every story has to be complete and over 500 words. I don't know if I'll manage to do it, but I think I'll have fun trying. If you want, you can read my stories as I post them here. You have to log in to the Forward Motion site to see them; this is because of rights protection. If you don't want to join Forward Motion but still want to read the horrid stories as I produce them this month, let me know and I can email them.

I did write a story last night, in my evening writers' group, and I've posted it as my first story. It's not great - it's really a partial scene from a longer work surrounded by summary, and it's written awkwardly because I was under a time limit - but I think the idea has some merit. I may actually end up using it as a seed for a longer work one day.

1 comment:

Sharon said...

I'd love to read your "horrid" stories as they're produced, thankyouverymuch! Keep me updated!