Shouldn’t I be writing?
So, I got an reply email from DH after I sent him to let him know I fixed a couple things on his website:
“Shouldn’t you be writing? ;)”
Doh. Caught procrastinating again. He knows how I get when a puzzle is put in front of me.
To be honest, I have been running a lot of things through my head and discarding a lot of them immediately after. I know one of my problems with working on turning this folktale into a story is not having a clear idea of the characters it’s about. I have the sequence of events that need to happen, but very little idea of who they need to happen to except in the most general of terms. So, that brings me to the idea of prewriting.
Prewriting Activities
Along with the cycle of studying craft, reflecting upon new concepts, and a reading spree to recharge, I also realized stories come faster and less painfully when I sit and think about the characters and their situations. I don’t mean only in terms of plotting or character sketches, but that and more.
I wanted to explore a couple new ways to get the old imagination running beyond the normal ones I seem to rely on: brainstorming and freewriting. Brainstorming is collecting a bunch of ideas without censorship regarding their ability to fit with what you want to write. Not quite how I’ve been doing, but close enough. In my journal entries, I tend to do Freewriting. I sit and write everything coming through my head for a set period of time or until I get past some arbitrary word count.
Both those methods are useful, but I wanted to dig a bit deeper for something to help me regain the sense of urgency – the need to get the story onto the page before the details evaporate.
Pretend and Play
Let your imagination run wild. No rolling around on the floor with the kids and constructing a castle out of couch cushions is necessary, but what would it hurt?
Look, Imagine, Think
Building upon the previous one, take some time to stop and smell the roses. Become more aware of the world and people around you and make up stories using your observations. What causes the mundane to be interesting? How about the person you pass every day but don’t know – what is their story?
Another way to accomplish these last two is by daydreaming. I think this is what those people who appear to be napping are doing when they claim they’re plotting. 😉
Add Sound and Music
Try different styles to match the mood you’re trying to capture. I find instrumental music with distinct rhythms much better to write to than popular songs. I discovered I distract myself by singing along to the lyrics, even though I used to do my homework with the most raucous music possible playing.
Doodle in the Margins
There’s something to be said for scribbling down notes with a pen on paper. For some reason, I always get a better grasp of what I’m trying to do when I write longhand. Somehow, I can sense how the pieces don’t fit together as neatly by writing the words out instead of assuming the neat, little lines of text are where they all belong.
I took a printed copy of this post with me when I went to pick the kids up from school and scribbled all over it. I also realized that block of time is one of my most productive for idea generating and distilling. Provided I don’t have a paperback in my hand. It’s only 15 minutes or so, but what an opportunity to focus while I’m a captive audience to my imagination.
Look at Lists
Lists can be fun to make and to peruse for ideas. After brainstorming and coming up with all those related things, then you can tackle the task of rejecting what doesn’t work for your story. Or, search through various lists for eye-catching entries.
As always, the real trick becomes knowing when to stop and just go write.
So, what do you do when you first get to know your characters and your story?
Hi, Kaige! I’ve been wondering how the story percolation was going.
How I get to know my STORY is to have a map of it–I want to do exactly what you did with the personal synop. Some stories you can write by the seat of your pants, but a story with an intricate plot? No. You have to know where to write towards.
For story ideas, I am inspired by everything I see, hear and read. Personalities, action scenes in movies, music. I once wrote a short story based on the Susan Goodman’s Dedication to her missing daughter in her book SUN SIGNS. The perfect music to go along with what I was FEELING at the time was Enya’s WATERMARK CD. I listened to nothing else while writing the story. I didn’t hear the same music over and over, my subconscious just picked up on the mood it created.
I get to know my characters only during writing. Nothing else has worked. It’s the writing when they step up to the plate and make themselves known.
Well, that’s me.
I have found that Gabriel’s Passion CD is one of the best for me to have playing while I write. Enya has words — also used it way too often to go to sleep to in college… Zzzzz….
Seat of the pants just doesn’t work for me. All I end up doing is going in circles and not really moving anything forward.
What do you think of the saying, “all writing is pre-writing”, Andi? Sometimes, it feels like all I’m doing is exploring the characters but not really managing to get the plot part down to something that works. I know, just keep practicing and eventually something will fall into place.
I like to either write out character traits for each person in my book, or better yet, find a picture online of someone they resemble and post it on my cork board! Staring them straight in the eyes does wonders for kicking the muse in the tush 🙂
Hey, Kaige. You’ve got some great ideas there! I’m new to the craft so I’ll definitely have to try some of those out.
I used to write mostly short stories and really all I needed was a good scene to pop into my head and I was rolling. Now with longer stories I’m having to do more work to get a good handle on the plot and characters. I’ve tried outlining and that works ok, but I never follow it exactly. Something I thought would be a couple hundred words will turn out to be a couple thousand.
I’ve tried filling out a roll playing questionaire to really flesh out the details of my characters, but only once. It was a lot of work, but I do think I learned a lot about the characters I was using.
I definitely cannot write while listening to music with words, or watching tv. I listen to classical (beethoven.com) or nothing while I’m writing.
🙂 Kat
Gosh, I know what you’re going through, Kaige. For my novellas and shorts stories, I used to pants like mad, but now that I’m working on novels, I just can’t fly by the seat of my pants anymore. It just doesn’t work, anymore.
However, if you still want the joy of pantsing while being semi-roadmap less, how about if you try plotting the next 3-4 chapters and then when you get those finished, plot the next 3-4 chapters? That’s what I’ve been doing, and it’s not all that bad. That way, you know what you need to do NOW, but you’re still a bit iffy on what to do later, and you can just write your way into whatever you’re thinking.
Doh, did that even make sense?
I have to listen to music when I’m writing. I can’t write when I don’t have any music. I’m writing my historical romance, but I find myself listening to soft pop or even, god help me, Phil Collins and Jesse McCartney. 🙂
I do a lot of day-dreaming too, although I usually get accused of “seeing” things. I see Tris standing on rooftops (commercial buildings, tucked into the piece behind the vents) I see Fallon in the trees. I hear voices, lol. If you try, focus reeal hard, you can visualize your people into being.
(but that’s just me being pyschotic)
I need some kind of a plot too, even if it’s an afterthought that I use to rearrange the scenes.
music…I like it, can’t listen to it when I write. Rain is good, and traffic.
but you’re right. That time when I’m sitting waiting for my kid, all alone in the car with a pen and a pad of paper. It’s like all the thoughts can unroll, without pressure, and I scribble all over the place. I try to capture key words and phrases to trigger the thought-strings before they go away. I am the most productive in that twenty minute time slot.
about pre-writing. I think….good writing is pre-writing. Pushing out word count for word count-sake is what happens to writers when they get popular. It’s also why they get “un” popular.
Thanks for sharing, Sue and Kat!
Fionn, it’s not so much the joy of pantsing that I’m looking for. I didn’t find a lot of urgency in that. Ok, here’s an example: I have this one short story. I read the call for submissions for the Freya’s Bower Winter thing last fall. Spent a Friday afternoon brainstorming possibilities while waiting to get the kids. Came home and started expanding on one of two of them. By midnight I knew what I wanted to write. Saturday morning, I was up and writing. That evening I had a rough draft around 5800 words. Polished it up on Sunday and got up the nerve to show it to DH. It had problems. Ok. So Monday, took it and flipped it and wrote it completely from his POV. Another 1500 words, bam! I almost couldn’t type fast enough to keep up. This wasn’t seat of the pants. I had a plan. But that’s the type of drive I was talking about. =)
I want to respond to Jodi’s comments too, but I have a dentist appt. in 18 minutes… back in a while!
Wow, great post and great discussion going on.
My characters are so alive in my head that fleshing them out usually isn’t the issue, reigning them in, yes – sometimes. Especially my secondary characters 🙂
I do a lot of walking in the thinking phase. I talk to my characters and let them talk to each other and really get to “know” them.
Keep up the great posting – you’re always making me think!
Kaige asked:
_What do you think of the saying, “all writing is pre-writing”, Andi?_
I think it’s spot-on. You’re writing to the Queen of rewrites here. 🙂
Jodi — it’s a bit harder to picture my characters in contemporary settings, but hey… I’m the one who thinks those devilish rogues and rakes of Regency London are so interesting. I think a lot of why I like that period isn’t for how life was at the time, but how it’s so unlike how life is now.
The slower pace, attending parties every night until the wee hours and sleeping in until noon… very appealing. Less gadgets and conveniences and less demands than I think we feel in today’s modern society.
I love my car time waiting for the bell to ring. I’m going to try to make a better habit of using it better! Word counts I can do. Word keepers, much harder.
Bria, I know what you mean about reigning in the secondaries. *glares at Barrington* I should get walking again since the foot doctor says I shouldn’t irritate my bone spur with my inserts and stretches beforehand. And it’s SPRING! No excuses, right?
I make a movie in my head. It’s not really daydreaming… it’s mental screenwriting. I stop and make notes along the way. As for music… that was what my TT was all about… the soundtrack of the Bar. I always have music going. I put on what suits me based on who/what I’m writing. Sometimes, to get the blood flowing I need to create, so I work on webpages, build blogs or forums, make graphics. I’m testing a new blog with McKenna’s story, A Heart to Match, right now.