Original fiction project – week of 1/18/2009

I followed my new plan of writing from an outline note prompt and a word prompt combination. The first blurb was sort of awkward and forced, but so what else is new. The second one flowed better, but after I wrote it, I realized it was not at all what I intended to write when I imagined the scene–and not in that good way where you write something unexpected and cool. It was more me not paying attention to details that lead to other details I still intended to write.

Still…I’m supposed to be just writing and not editing right now, right? Except I really wanted to fix it. Sometimes, you have to fix what you’ve written to move on properly. And so really, the main reason I was hesitating editing the scene was that the final result might end up decreasing my total word count for the week. So I decided that I would just rewrite the scene to get it the way I wanted it, and count the words in the new version as all new words. The point here, after all, is to encourage my writing, not sabotage it.

After that, I returned to my prompts to write something actually new. But I was stuck. A lot of my little outline notes are vague and handwavy, and require a lot more detail before I can even start writing. Like, one of my notes said that a cop is tipped off to my spirit being characters because “red flags” get raised during a “background investigation.” Whatever that means. I think it’s just a story kink I want to include in my tale somewhere–background investigations, red flags, characters living in the shadows coming under the scrutiny of the authorities. It begs the question, “what red flags?” What about my characters piques the police investigator’s interest? I had to work that out before I could write anything else on that prompt. So 47 of my words in the 1,209 were me researching and brain storming about common red flags in background investigations.

Then something interesting happened. I started writing the actual fiction blurb to go with that prompt, and this new character came into the story. She is now dead, but she had a role to play in my characters’ past, and another character like the type of person she is (a psychic “sensitive” to spirits) could appear later. Now that’s the type of unexpected writing I want. Something totally outside the box of my little outline and its ties to the old ’99 story.