Scene Sheet Update

I have one of my sucky three-day headaches goin' on right now, so I'll be brief:

I'm chugging along doing scene sheets. Just hit the mid-point at 27 scenes. I'm planning to finish them ("finish" in the sense that I have a page for each with at least some basic info) by the end of Wednesday, so that I can use my long writing day Thursday to start working on some exercises from the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook.

The Girl With The Spider Tattoo

Almost 15 years ago, I got a tattoo of a spider spinning a web between two blackberry bushes on my left upper arm and shoulder. It was my third (and possibly last) tattoo, and by far the largest. I was in my late twenties, in grad school for fiction writing, and beginning to realize what a hard row to hoe a novel really is. I was scared I wouldn't be able to do it-- would never finish a novel, never be published, never be a "real" writer. All my workshop cohorts from college had long since given up writing and settled into sensible careers like advertising or law. And no offense to any lawyers out there (some of my own parents are lawyers!), but thought of following them down that path was terrifying.

I felt the need to take vows, like a nun or a bride; to make a concrete commitment to the dream I'd had since I was seven years old and decided I, Lianna Williamson, was a writer, just like my childhood hero Laura Ingalls Wilder.

So I decided to get a tattoo of a spider. But not a scary, black punk spider; I wanted a pretty, light-brown, muse-like spider, and I wanted it sitting on the top of my shoulder, so that when I glanced down I would see it and be reminded of my pledge to myself to never give up on being a writer. And I never have-- even when I've gone for months or even years without writing, part of me always kept the faith.

And every time I see a spider-- every time, and our woodland home is surrounded by webs-- I feel like I should be writing.

From time to time, I've noticed something odd about my tattoo: occasionally it kind of puffs up for a few days, so that if I run my fingers over my shoulder I can clearly feel the outline of the spider sitting there. More recently, I've realized that it's only the spider that does this; the web and the branches don't puff up. I mentioned it to a tattoo artist acquaintance, expecting to hear an explanation; but instead he just frowned a bit and said that after all these years I shouldn't be experiencing any inflammation, and that even if it was a reaction to sunscreen or something, why would only the spider be affected?

This spring, after I stumbled and fell during my attempt to at last finish EN, the spider puffed up again. And it stayed that way-- not for days this time, but months. In June, my dear college friend D. came up from Florida to visit, and we took a road trip to our old stomping grounds in Woodstock, NY so she could get a tattoo at Pat's Tats, the shop where I got all three of my tattoos. While we were there, Pat took a look at my shoulder (tattoo artists love to inspect work they did long ago) and asked me what was up with the spider.

"I think it's mad at me because I haven't written lately," I said.

Pat nodded sagely. She's a spiritual old broad herself.

And now, the weird part: pretty much the day I started working on NP, the spider deflated, and has been lying serenely in its web ever since.

Checking In

Productive day! I "spun" 4 times and got the whole plot fleshed out, minus a few holes that still need spackling. I also made up a "scene sheet" template, and have been setting up sheets for the early scenes. I've done eight so far. Even though there's no way I'll be able to fill out an entire sheet for every scene in the book at this stage of the game, I'd like to have them at least started. It'll give me a place to write notes to myself like "mention x here", and help me to define the goal of each scene, and keep track of timelines. At least, I think it will. In case you haven't noticed, I'm pretty much winging this novel thing.

And you'll be happy to hear that the living room, while perhaps not "clean" in the strictest sense of the term, is vastly improved.

Spinning

I have a long day to myself today-- quite possibly the last such day of the summer. Next week is The Son's last week of morning camp, and I should be busier with SAT tutoring through August. So I need to make the most of it!

Today I'm doing something The Weekend Novelist calls "spinning down the page". Basically, you write out the plot of your novel, scene by scene, in a kind of freewrite-meets-bad-poetry form, in short lines
that run down the page
like this
including whatever details
or snippets of dialogue
that occur to you
as you write without stopping to edit
until the timer goes off.

I did this for 30 minutes and got through Act I. I'm going to try to go for three more 30-minute sessions and wind up with a rough scene-by-scene outline by the end of the day.

And I really need to clean the living room. We have an issue with The Son's art supplies taking over every flat surface in the house.

Houston, We Have Plot!

I just finished the problem/solution chain for NP! Eight pages, single-spaced. Three Acts. Rough, yes, and sporting some vague "problems" like "Showdown with Roma". I'm sure it will be substantially overhauled in the coming weeks and months. But still: I plotted a whole novel! Wheee!

Fearless

Plotting away. Still doing timed writings, and I typed up the scrawled problem/solution chart for the first half of the story. Hoping to inch forward on that tonight.

I also worked out my six key scenes (opening, plot point one, mid-point, plot point two, climax, and closing), and I've got notes for all of them except the climax, which as always is the toughest one for me to see clearly.

In other news, I picked a theme song for NP: "Fearless" by Pink Floyd. It's a song with heavy emotional ex-lover associations for me, but it is so perfect for Irsa and Akenam I am willing to hand it over to them. Also on my brand-new NP playlist: "On the Road to Find Out" by Cat Stevens and "Pink Moon" by Nick Drake. I am writing about SF hippies, apparently. I'd love to stick a Gorillaz song in there, too-- maybe "Dare".

Plot Ahoy!

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.