I finished the first round of worldbuilding. I still have more fiddling to do, but I have also decided to give in and admit that I've already plunged ahead into working on plot.
I had the first half of the story roughly plotted out, but the second half was mostly a blank, and I had some niggly unanswered questions that were making me nervous, since the niggly unanswered questions in EN are STILL giving me headaches 128 years into writing it. I don't need to have every little thing worked out before I start writing, but I'm not getting stuck in the "oh crap, I have no idea what my climax should be" place again.
So Friday night, I opened a file where I'd been collecting one-line scene ideas, and began shuffling them around into sections labeled Act I, Act II, and Act III, and adding new scenes as they occurred to me. To my surprise, I figured out a whole chunk of the remaining story doing this somewhat half-baked exercise. My climax scene is still hazy (grr), but I have a plan of attack to get at the heart of it.
I took The Weekend Novelist out of the library while we were on the Cape, and I devoured it. When we got home I ordered it from amazon... only to have a very much "revised and updated" version arrive. At first I was dismayed, since I really wanted to be able to reference the exercises and examples in the original edition, but now I'm over it and combing the book for what it has to offer. I've plotted NP along a Mythic Journey curve, and have begun doing a series of timed writings (with startlines like "This is a story about a character who..." and "My protagonist escapes the cage when...") in hopes of accessing any story wisdom my subconscious has to offer.
That's where I'm at, three weeks to the day after beginning this novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment