Nanowrimo 2018 - day 25

Daily word count:  4,376

Total word count:  47,102

Not a bad day.

My desk is in the corner of a large room. I have a standing desk as well but what I don’t have is the space to put up things on the walls. I love index cards but I can’t spread them out anywhere at the moment.

The dining table is currently occupied by a four person Warhammer 40k game…

Sighs.

Months ago I picked up three super light corkboards from Kmart - one for each Act. But then I didn’t know what to do with them; I had nowhere to hang them on the wall. But, I had an idea. I thought I might be able to hang them off an Ikea Ivar book ends that slide onto the shelves and voila… it worked. If I hang them sideways.

In a truly mind hurting example of my brain function, I wrote out the Romance Beat sheet cards from the Gwen Hayes book, and then edged them in washi tape that matches the colours of the Scrivener template she also gives you in a link in the e-book. Purple, red, teal, and orange. Then I dug in the jar and found push pins in colours to match, as well.

Why, brain, why?

Is the rest of my life this terrifyingly organised? No, of course not. *rolls eyes at self*

Given this particular nanowrimo project is a last minute, non plotted pile of words, with a lot of super helpful notes like: then Oliver %% whatever his damn name is said,

OR %% father’s GF,

OR %% make sure you lampshade this earlier;

Or whatever convoluted and vague notes I’ve left for myself, it will take some work to disentangle it. It’s not even in any kind of chronological order. I will have to sit down with the 50k I’ve written and work out what goes where, what can be kept, or edited, and what scenes are missing. And that’s why I’ll need those index cards.

But with less than 3k words left, I’m going to make it, which is 50k words more than I had at the start of the month.

And I saw ANOTHER idea for the file box.

A Japanese woman hired an actor to pretend to be the father of her daughter. After ten years, the daughter still does not know, he is not her real father.

WHAT? ARE YOU KIDDING? I swear I’ve read that fanfic. But really, how do you even start untying that Gordion knot. Does he care about the girl? Does he want to be her father? Can they get married now and live happily ever after?

So many questions…

And funnily enough, my nano project is about fake dating, doubling down on the lie, and then how you go about starting to fix it when it inevitably goes wrong.

Links:

'I hired a man to pretend to be mydaughter’s dad - and she doesn't know'

Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels (How to Write Kissing Books Book 1) by Gwen Hayes

What you find when you aren't looking for it

I was cleaning up my internet bookmark folder while listening to a podcast today.

It started when my brain skittered off with some ideas from that talk that should go in some of my writing. I headed off to find that work, couldn’t find it, and ended up making a note in a different program [google keep] with a reminder to pop up later.

Then I saw a lot of my ‘how to use social media’ posts dated from 2012. Seriously out of date when social media changes daily, so I started pruning and tidying up. I made a new heading of ‘writing tools’ and was dragging bookmarks into it. Some I had to click on to see what they were, and why I had bothered to save them.

And I found a plot generator I had totally forgotten about. I LOVE these things. I love a challenge. And it sounds funny, but it is much easier to write within strict boundaries than it is to write with the freedom of choice of the entire world. Too much choice is paralysing.

There are a number of different genres. I picked paranormal romance (my jam) and let it randomise everything. And voila…

Hilarious. I really love the reviews.

But… I reckon I could write that.

Links:

The podcast - Jeff Goins

140: Stop Starving and Start Making a Living from Your Art: Interview with Cory Huff

plot generator

I think I’m a gardener

Not in the real world sense but in the writing sense. There is an idea that you can be a story architect who plans it all out to the ‘enth degree and builds a beautiful constructed story OR you can be a person who throws out a whole lot of seeds, sees which ones come up and then prunes them or transplants them until you have a finished story.

This is often termed plotters and pantsers - as in they work by the seat of their pants.

To think of writer examples, Ken Follett - Pillars of the earth - is a plotter/architect. He starts with a plan for each chapter and then expands it all out. He talks about it here in his masterclass lectures.

He thinks it out and writes a twenty five to forty page outline. It contains everything chapter by chapter that will happen in the book. He also writes out biographies for each character. This process takes him about a month. He is famous enough to then send that outline to his agent or publisher and, if they approve, he can get paid for writing it. That’s a pretty big incentive in my eyes.

The snowflake guy, Randy Ingermanson, does a similar thing. He starts with a one sentence synopsis and expands that to one paragraph and then expands that out to one page and so on…  

I have read all about this method and I have downloaded a template for Scrivener and I have tried to use this method but… it’s just not me.

Examples from the other end of the spectrum are Dan Wells, the horror writer, and George RR Martin, Game of Thrones writer. Terrifying isn’t it? The guy who makes up the incredibly wordy, detailed and complex world of Game of Thrones is making it up as he goes along.

Dan has a rough plan, not for the story itself but for the marks it should hit. He calls it a seven point plan. He has uploaded some lectures on this to YouTube and the link is on his website. The marks are things like: the hook - the idea that grabs you as a reader, the turning point, and the resolution.

Or here for a pdf slideshow.

Brandon Sanderson, epic fantasy writer, says he is somewhere in the middle. He outlines the story but his characters emerge as he writes it. In this situation, how will my main character react?

Neither way is better than the other; they are just different.

Having tried both, I think I lean towards pantser/gardener.

My most popular fanfiction stories were written in pretty much the order they were posted with daily updates loaded as I wrote them. I had a vague idea of the ending; very vague - as in X ends up with Y and they are happy and to get there and this has to change about Y. I totally wrote Apologies in six weeks (all 90k words of it) and pulled the ending out of my ass in the last chapter and I had one review that said I had intricately planted this winding thread right through the story. I wish I had planned that, but… Nope.

Same with Best Friends share everything. I was just writing sex and then had to go back and find the story. Maybe I left some hints for myself? I don’t know… but I had to make sense of it all later.

I have been trying to be more planning oriented and in the process I think I have squished myself worrying about what my main character’s favourite food is or whatever else I am meant to be filling out in his character sheet.

Start at the end, start in the middle, or fill out characters later - whatever. Who cares, as long as you are writing?