Category: storytelling

Original fiction project – week of 11/08/2009

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 2 Comments

November is turning out to be a “take-stock” sort of month for me. Which makes sense. I finished a five-year-long writing project on the last day of October, and am only days away now from my birthday. Today marks the two-year anniversary of starting my present job. Pinned between those those events as I am, I feel take-stocky–cleaning the disaster zone that is my house after pouring most of my energy into writing and home improvement; organizing and filing away the piles of paper work that have just accumulated because I throw everything papery that is not an unpaid bill or obvious junk mail in a big pile; making a *budget* (eep).

And continuing the process of pulling together and collating all the ideas on my new story I’ve come up with in the last year.

I think the next step will be to pick a few of the ideas I like best, and just start writing. No outline, minimal quality control, no word count or deadline goals. And as soon as I run out of ideas, return to my giganamous idea font. And of course report in here that I am indeed doing that.

Original fiction project – week of 6/07/2009

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 7 Comments

More work on the morning pages this week. Not as many words as previous weeks, due to unscheduled brain-deadness. You know, there’s still a part of me that wonders sometimes what it is I am doing every morning, since I’m not, strictly speaking, “writing fiction.” I’m outlining, tossing around ideas, accepting or rejecting them, developing characters, thinking about how things will work, but not doing much that actually counts as “writing fictional prose.”

I have been a bit consternated lately since the story I’m developing is still thin on details of actual scenes and is sort of all broad strokes and general plot points. And those broad strokes and general plot points just keep getting more complicated and convoluted. And it’s consternating because I am struggling at the same time to figure out how to cut half, if not more, of the words out of my old ’93 novel, Dis/Inhibition, and here I am busily developing another story that’s going to be just as long.

The only difference is, I’m catching this fact before even a single word is written, and so I can plan ahead of time to make this not one, but a series of novels, with a natural division point, unlike my old novel.

Last weekend I was sitting in a dark theater watching the new Star Trek movie for the second time, enjoying one of the most complicated, convoluted SFF stories of all time, which is of course, also not one story but dozens, if not hundreds of stories. Star Trek is a story world.

And it occurred to me that that is what I’m doing right now. I’m not “writing my story,” I’m world-building. And that’s as important a step as writing fictional prose or plotting the novel. A good “story world” is a world we will want to visit over and over until all its stories are told.

Original fiction project – week of 4/26/2009

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 7 Comments

Another week, another five morning pages, this time totalling 2,077 words. I am really glad I have developed this practice, but only a couple things are keeping it from turning into a rut of me tapping out prose that doesn’t excite me. One morning, I was writing something about the mythology of my spirit creatures when I just thought, “Ugh, I don’t like this.” So I rewrote the same paragraph four times, each time changing the details until I wrote something that actually interested me. That’s a useful technique to remember.

The other thing that occurred to me, since I am writing in character POV now (when I remember to–hey, it’s 5:30 am when I do this stuff), is to bring in the soap opera already. I have realized this since I started re-reading my old novel, Dis/inhibition. It’s got a lot of stuff about grad school and careers and life, but in the main, it’s about relationships. X loves Y but cheats with Z. A is at odds with their boss, B, and does conniving things to get the upper hand in the relationship. That sort of stuff. It doesn’t come as naturally to me now as it did ten or fifteen years ago, but it’s still what draws a person into a story, even if it’s about space aliens or spirit beings.

It’s also time again for me to go through what I’ve written up until now and pick out the parts I like the best and expand on them in what I write next.

And just keep at it, even when I feel like it’s in a rut.

Ever wish you could have a left-brained lobotomy?

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 5 Comments

A temporary one, at any rate?

I’ve been fishing around trying to find some way to deal with my creative block, because it’s not the same as writer’s block. I can write lots and lots of stuff. It’s just not going where I need it to go. Tapping into the subconscious mind where my story is hiding…that’s a challenge for a heavily left-brained gal like me.

Anything I do that is truly creative has to burble up on its own from my subconscious. And there’s only so much my conscious efforts can do to bring it forth. And of course, there is the issue of garbage in, garbage out. My subconscious mind is only as creative as what it has been exposed to in the universe.

I have gone back to all those creativity manuals, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”, “The Artist’s Way”, “Writing Down the Bones”. And then finally, I dredged up my (very old) copy of “Writing the Natural Way”, trying to find some exercises that can accomplish a left-brain by-pass.