little things

[rivendellrose]

Spent the morning reading and writing, and then went up to the school (through huge amounts of rain, thunder, lightning and wind!) to say hi to my old boss and help miss_arel with researching her term paper. And while I was at it, I attacked the UW libraries and came out with a little pile of hobby-research books - it got into my head a few days ago that I really needed to do some research on gypsy cultures and practices, particularly relating to death, religion, taboos, etc. I get like this sometimes - I run into a culture in something, and become hell-bent on reading every damned thing I can find about it. *g* Incidentally, it always fascinates me to read anthropology texts written before about 1980 - they tend to use phrases like "In the primitive mind..." which have the tendency to me go "bwuh?" Modern anthropology frowns on the use of that word... Ah well, still a very useful and interesting book. I ♥ going on random ethnography-binges.

And, with many thanks to those who put up with my whining about NaNo last night, I am once again feeling mostly okay on that subject. ...Which I suppose means I should actually work on it, rather than ignoring the thing in favor of totally random and very very long-term fic projects.

Mostly I felt like today was Saturday. It still feels like I'll be going back to work in a few days, sort of, though I'm starting to slowly get used to the idea of that not being the case. And next week is the seminar, so that'll keep me quite busy for a few days. Fun stuff.

Update: A full week late, but I've passed the 25,000 mark on NaNoWriMo. If I double-time my wordcounts for the rest of the month, I can still make it. And, lo and be-fecking-hold, I'm starting to feel like I'm finally hitting a stride of knowing what I'm doing/where I'm going with this dratted thing, too. It'll still need a lot of revision and work later, but... I'm feeling pretty okay about it at the moment. *Knocks on wood* And now to bed, with hopes of an early-ish start and a high word count tomorrow!

Comments

[windrose.livejournal.com]

I get like this sometimes - I run into a culture in something, and become hell-bent on reading every damned thing I can find about it. *g*

I do that, too, though it's not limited to just cultures. I'll obsess about, say, Tombstone in the 1880s. Or WWI German aviators. Or the battle of Chancelorsville in the Civil War. Or Mayan sculpture. Total historical magpie.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah... that's me, too, now that you mention it. I think of it being mostly cultures, but in reality, I get just as neurotic about, say... the sorts of "human monstrosities" that were found in circus sideshows of the 19th century. That one led to a lot of really weird research for a long time, and still has me going "oooo" every time I see a book on the subject. I'm the only person I know who gets excited about the subject of conjoined twins. XD

Yay for intellectual magpie-ism!

[cassildra.livejournal.com]

Well, now you're not. Circus sideshows? Totally fascinating.

Also, I wanted to tell you--as if you didn't know--write now, revise in December. Revising slows you down.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Woohoo!!!

Oh hell yes. All I do in terms of revising for the moment is that if I write a whole scene and then realize it sucks, I just highlight it in a different color. No way in hell am I bothering to do all that stuff until I'm done with the time-constraint thing. :D

[moonvoyager.livejournal.com]

I'm glad things are going better with your novel! Sorry I didn't send the exercise last night--I will try to find it sometime during this weekend & send it to you. (We're going to be rearranging the house & painting, starting tonight.)

Part of the reason I count my brainstorming as part of my word count is, not only does it often include half-scenes with dialogue & description as they pop into my head for future use (since I write longhand I just separate my notes from the ongoing draft with brackets whenever they occur to me--which is another practical reason why I count them--there's no easy way to pull this out of the page count)--but more important, they'll form part of the structure later on when I type it all up. Then I'll be organizing, rearranging & combining scenes, putting all my notes together with those scenes so that I don't forget or lose anything, and rewriting a lot of what I already had based on those notes. So, not only are they an integral part of the whole, there's no privilege to the words that belong to the "straight narrative" right now--because odds are most of those are going to disappear or change through the rewrite process, as well. Another thing I do is, if I feel that something was missing from an earlier chapter or scene, or realize that I should have done something a different way, I'll write that new version as part of my ongoing draft, or at the very least make detailed notes about it (I have a rewrite of chapter one in my notebook now, midway into chapter two). Due to a variety of reasons--feeling my way, different versions of a scene, overwriting, things that later don't feel relevant, etc.--my first drafts usually end up cut by at least a third, and sometimes half, in terms of word count. In terms of actual words...I don't know. Probably more, as I've changed a lot of them by that point.

This is part of what sets me free to keep drafting. The whole process is very fluid and I know that the first draft stage includes a lot of sketching, so I don't worry as much about a particular scene or section, because they may even change before I finish the full first draft. Sometimes I only figure out exactly what the "right" scenes to tell the story are after I've finished the entire draft & started rewriting it. But if I hadn't pushed through all the way, I'd never have gotten to that place.

So if your characters don't seem to be doing what they should to advance the plot, don't sweat it. The answer will come to you later. I trust in your writing abilities--you have a lot of talent, and a sure touch. The smart things that you can do with a single scene will come to help you when you are ready to revise your novel, after the characters & their story have come together in their first form. Then you'll know exactly what to do...even if you are only discovering part of it now.

I don't know if this helps, but in a way, I think of writing fanfic as having the first draft part already finished, because the characters and their universe are already established (that's what you're trying to do right now). The stories of yours that I've read are told with such confidence...trust in yourself that you will be able to do this with your own work as well, once you've finished the first draft & gotten a bit of distance from it.

I apologize if all this is old hat to you :)

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

No worries at all, whenever you have time - there's no rush.

I'm vastly impressed that you can do all that stuff longhand - I write scenes that way occasionally, or bits of dialogue that I'm afraid I'll forget, but my problem is that it all has to get into the computer at some point... and I hate spending a lot of time just transcribing. :P So I usually do the main part of my writing on my computer. As for counting the plotting, though... I may have to steal that idea. I've been doing it in a separate document, since I started about a month beforehand with brainstorming, but anything I do now really ought to count for it, you're right.

Thank you. The confidence thing... this is the first time I've really worked on an original piece in several years, and while I've grown up a lot as a writer in that time, I still get really edgy about plot stuff. Deep down, I think I know that if I just keep going, something will eventually come out... it's just hard to trust that when the usual beginning-writer-ly angst comes up.

I think of writing fanfic as having the first draft part already finished, because the characters and their universe are already established (that's what you're trying to do right now)

I cannot express how grateful I am to you for putting this in words. As soon as I read it, I realized that's exactly what it is, but that I'd never quite figured that out before. And it makes me feel so much better about how awkward I sometimes feel on my own work, compared to working with a basis that's already set out. I'd been aware from the beginning that what I was working on at the moment was just puttering and piecing things together, but it never quite clicked that once I'd done it all once, it'd be so much easier (so much more what I'm used to!) to go back and refine, figure out details of motivation and plot, all those little things. Thank you, thank you, thank you!