NaNoWriMo Day 2

New words: 2249
Total words: 3250
Goal: 50,000
Percentage: 6.5%

Quote-worth snippet:

Connor flies out, yelling and flailing, then –

SMACK!

Is brought to a halt by something HARD he hits head-first.

TIGHT SHOT – He slumps flat, face-down on a dirt-covered plank of wood. His body is still for a moment. Finally, he shifts slightly and groans.

CONNOR
(muffled)
Ow.

Amazing how a little sleep (not to mention totally changing your tactics) can effect your effectiveness!

I will write no sentence before its time!

Yesterday I had this idea that I would write the episodes in a linear fashion, starting with the teaser of both episodes and proceeding to scene two of each, scene three of each, etc., writing each scene in its entirety before moving onto the next. Well, that lasted as long as it took to start scene two. I was twitching within a few seconds. Some stuff is just easier to write than others, and if you write in a linear fashion, you can linger over the hard parts for *hours* making no progress at all. And what you do end up writing sucks.

Normally, when I get to a part I can’t wrap my brain around (yet), I just stick a shorthand note in brackets as a placeholder and move on. Like this:

[Connor expression]

(I often have trouble visualizing character’s expressions while I’m writing. They come to me later when I’m away from the words and just imagining the scene in my head)

So rather than slog through each scene writing TOTAL CRAP in some places just to get through the hard parts, I decided to write just a little bit for each scene instead, proceeding in a linear fashion. Today it was the scene-setting bits. In a script, at least when I’m writing them, the first thing you need to do at the start of each new scene is describe the setting ever so briefly, because that’s what the audience would see after the fade-in. So I did that today, and got about a quarter of the way through that process for both episodes.

This was so much easier to do. Still challenging, but easier to wrap my brain around–where does this scene take place? What images or sounds start the scene off?

So I’ll just proceed from there tomorrow.