Personal Project Day (and more!)

Hey y’all. Just some updates about next week.

 

We are officially meeting at Common Grounds on Tuesdays for De-Stress Tuesdays from 8PM-10PM, if you don’t know where that is… look it up. This will be a chill, un-prompted event. All those attended are recommended to bring something to write with, moneys for snacks and milkshakes, and a calm quiet demeanor.

 

Our regular meeting will be on Saturday at 4PM in Kauke 141 (the door open to us will be the old main entrance under the arch), and we will be doing personal project day. Those attending are asked to bring a personal project to write or a printed copy of something short that they would like edited by other club members. We are suspending our usual quiet time for writing in order to allow discussion of pieces, so those choosing to write may want to bring HEADPHONES.

 

Anyway, see you there. I hope you are all having a lovely week.

Art Prompt Week!

Hey, y’all. This week we’re doing Art Prompts. If you can’t make it to our meeting, there’s a link to our art prompt presentation, and all of the art that I pick from is on our Tumblr (yes we have a Tumblr now), it’s updated daily (and there’s other prompts, writing advice, etc. there). I recommend selecting a number and seeing what’s on that slide to write on, but by all means take a look around and see what inspires you. We have examples of scenes, concepts, characters, and the like so remember inspiration doesn’t just come in the shape of story ideas. Prompts can help with characterization, concepts, setting, movement, etc.. I’m sorry if they’re mostly fantasy and sci-fi pictures (I write mostly fantasy so that’s what inspires me), but I tried to include a little of everything.

See you soon!

 

Worst First Line Prompt

Hey y’all today we had our second meeting of the year. Our prompt today was worst first lines, in which we started a story with one of these lines. In case you didn’t make it, or wanted to try it on your own, here’s a copy of our prompts from today. I challenge you to use one as the first line (completely unchanged).

  1. Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
  1. As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand – who would take her away from all this – and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.
  1. She strutted into my office wearing a dress that clung to her like Saran Wrap to a sloppily butchered pork knuckle, bone and sinew jutting and lurching asymmetrically beneath its folds, the tightness exaggerating the granularity of the suet and causing what little palatable meat there was to sweat, its transparency the thief of imagination.
  1. The fairies of Minglewood, which is near Dingly Pool, were having a grand revel with flower-cakes, and butterfly dances, looking ever so pretty, while Queen Bellaflora swept her wand o’er the waterfall’s foam, making it pop like the snot-bubbles on your baby sister’s face.
  1. For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
  1. Betty had eyes that said come here, lips that said kiss me, arms and torso that said hold me all night long, but the rest of her body said, “Fillet me, cover me in cornmeal, and fry me in peanut oil”; romance wasn’t easy for a mermaid.
  1. On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
  1. As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.
  1. The Mushroom Men of Knarf were silently advancing on the unsuspecting earthlings, and their thin milky blood ran colder when they smelled spores from fungal toenail infections rising from many of the invaders’ feet, for to them it was a wondrous and shocking scent of kinship, homeland, and asexual reproduction.
  1. It was such a beautiful night; the bright moonlight illuminated the sky, the thick clouds floated leisurely by just above the silhouette of tall, majestic trees, and I was viewing it all from the front row seat of the bullet hole in my car trunk.
  1. As an ornithologist, George was fascinated by the fact that urine and feces mix in birds’ rectums to form a unified, homogeneous slurry that is expelled through defecation, although eying Greta’s face, and sensing the reaction of the congregation, he immediately realized he should have used a different analogy to describe their relationship in his wedding vows.
  1. As the sun dropped below the horizon, the safari guide confirmed the approaching cape buffaloes were herbivores, which calmed everyone in the group, except for Herb, of course.
  1. Sterben counted calcium bars in the storage chamber, wondering why women back on Earth paid him little attention, but up here they seem to adore him, in fact, six fraichemaidens had already shown him their blinka.
  1. “Hmm …” thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright white patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells, where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of sequins on the flyfish’s bow ties, “time to get my meds checked.”
  1. The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen’s hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.
  1. He swaggered into the room (in which he was now the “smartest guy”) with a certain Wikipedic insouciance, and without skipping a beat made a beeline towards Dorothy, busting right through her knot of admirers, and she threw her arms around him and gave him a passionate though slightly tickly kiss, moaning softly, “Oooohh, Scarecrow!”
  1. She sipped her latte gracefully, unaware of the milk foam droplets building on her mustache, which was not the peachy-fine baby fuzz that Nordic girls might have, but a really dense, dark, hirsute lip-lining row of fur common to southern Mediterranean ladies nearing menopause, and winked at the obviously charmed Spaniard at the next table.
  1. On their first date he’d asked how much she thought Edgar Allan Poe’s toe nails would sell for on eBay, and on their second he paid for subway fair with nickels he fished out of a fountain, but he was otherwise charming and she thought that they could have a perfectly tolerable life together.
  1. Like a mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home, hugs his wife, and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater – love touches you, and marks you forever.
  1. Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay – the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.
  1. The professor looked down at his new young lover, who rested fitfully, lashed as she was with duct tape to the side of his stolen hovercraft, her head lolling gently in the breeze, and as they soared over the buildings of downtown St. Paul to his secret lair he mused that she was much like a sweet ripe juicy peach, except for her not being a fuzzy three-inch sphere produced by a tree with pink blossoms and that she had internal organs and could talk.
  1. As she slowly drove up the long, winding driveway, Lady Alicia peeked out the window of her shiny blue Mercedes and spied Rodrigo the new gardener standing on a grassy mound with his long black hair flowing in the wind, his brown eyes piercing into her very soul, and his white shirt open to the waist, revealing his beautifully rippling muscular chest, and she thought to herself, “I must tell that lazy idiot to trim the hedges by the gate.”
  1. Gerald began – but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash – to pee.
  1. Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.
  1. Colin grabbed the switchgear and slammed the spritely Vauxhall Vixen into a lower gear as he screamed through the roundabout heading toward the familiar pink rowhouse in Puking-On-The-Wold, his mind filled with the image of his comely Olive, dressed in some lacy underthing, waiting on the couch with only a smile and a cucumber sandwich, hoping that his lunch hour would provide sufficient time for both a naughty little romp and a digestive biscuit.
  1. He was a dark and stormy knight, and this excited Gwendolyn, but admittedly not as much as last night when he was Antonio Banderas in drag, or the night before that when he was a French Legionnaire who blindfolded her and fed her pommes frites from his kepi.
  1. Corinne considered the colors (palest green, gray and lavender) and texture (downy as the finest velvet) and wondered, “How long have these cold cuts been in my refrigerator?”
  1. Chain-smoking as he stood in the amber glow of the street lamp, he gazed up at the brownstone wherein resided Bunny Morgan, and thought how like a bunny Bunny was, though he had read somewhere that rabbits were coprophages, which meant that they ate their own feces, which was really disgusting now that he thought about it, and nothing like Bunny, at least he hoped not, so on second thought Bunny wasn’t like a bunny after all, but she still was pretty hot.
  1. Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.
  1. “Bring a bottle of wine and wear something uncomplicated – I’m in no mood for a struggle tonight,” rolled from Jean-Pierre’s lips like a bowling ball shooting up the return ramp, only to slow itself abruptly at the top before ka-whonking! into the balls already lined up there like all the lines she had heard before, and Sylvia knew at last that all the good ones were not married, gay, or in Mexican prisons.
  1. When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday, his children packed his bags and drove him to Golden Pastures retirement complex just off Interstate 95.
  2. Before they met, his heart was a frozen block of ice, scarred by the skate blades of broken relationships, then she came along and like a beautiful Zamboni flooded his heart with warmth, scraped away the ugly slushy bits, and dumped them in the empty parking lot of his soul.
  1. As I gardened, gazing towards the autumnal sky, I longed to run my finger through the trail of mucus left by a single speckled slug – innocuously thrusting past my rhododendrons – and in feeling that warm slime, be swept back to planet Alderon, back into the tentacles of the alien who loved me.
  2. Joe would have been perfect for her if he wasn’t the worst.
  1. “I never did like the word spoon.”
  2. “He wondered if someone had cut the brake line, but when he placed his foot down, the car stopped.”
  3. “’Why are you wearing that hat?’ she asked, which prompted me to think, “’Why am I wearing this hat?’”
  4. The elven city of Losstii faced towering sea cliffs and abutted rolling hills that in the summer were covered with blankets of flowers and in the winter were covered with blankets, because the elves wanted to keep the flowers warm and didn’t know much at all about gardening.
  5. Kat Russo, Loveland, Colorado
  6. Francisco Franco’s wife, seen smiling in all those photos with the same big hat on, was actually the brains behind the dictatorship, the concentration camps, torture, the brutal suppression, and so forth, but she was a shy lady, except when she dressed up in the binding closet for Franco, who listened a-quiver to hear what a very bad boy he’d been.— John Holmes, St. Petersburg, Florida
  7. As Lewiston Creol plummeted down the sheer icy cliff he pondered on the word plummet, which quickly lost its meaning if you said it too much (plummet plummet plummet), but his pondering was interrupted by the surface of the water, at which point he ceased to plummet and began to plunge. — Jason Chandler, Saratoga Springs, New York
  8. As he lay dying on the smoke-wreathed battlefield, General Winthrop finally realized the terrible toll the war had taken, and he wondered if the bloodshed had all been for naught as he exhaled his last breath in a sort of “meoooooh,” actually very similar to the sound his cat Mister Jingles made when he wanted some food or was doing that thing with the drapes. — Mike Christensen, Washington, DC
  9. Detective Sam Steel stood at the crime scene staring puzzled at the chalk outline of Ms. Mulgrave’s body which was really just a stick figure with a dress, curly hair, boobs, and a smiley face because the police chalk guy had the day off. — Doug Self, Brunswick, Maine.
  10. The warehouse was completely empty except for the mutilated corpse wearing a tuxedo covered with bloodstains, and a Mortimer Snerd dummy lying nearby on the floor, and Detective McIntosh knew Snerd wouldn’t talk. — Doug Purdy, Roseville, California
  11. As hard-boiled detective Max Baxter ate his soft-boiled egg, he thought about the gorgeous dame he’d found last night lying in a pool of her own blood—it being inconvenient to lie in a pool of someone else’s blood—and wondered how she liked her eggs.— Pam Tallman, Huntington Beach, California

Welcome Back

Hey y’all! I meant to post earlier to say welcome back to Wooster. As you know Writing Club won’t meet until the 8th of September, but I will be tabling Scot Spirit day this year at 4:30 pm, so if you’re there come say hi and I will (fingers crossed) have freezie pops.

Personal NaNoWriMo Update (What to Prepare for)

Hey ya’ll, I’m back. It’s been a weird week for me writing wise. TBH, I’ve gotten pretty lazy with my writing schedule since school started in fall and I haven’t adjusted back to summer schedule, but that’s why I love NaNoWriMo so much. It’s an excuse to write regularly and as usual I’ve started early.

 

I started NaNoWriMo back in April of my Senior year, which was just great since I had AP’s the next month along with regular school work. Thankfully I had a reasonable goal, but it meant that I had to seriously adjust my schedule since I usually studied for AP Latin before school every day (daily tests), which meant getting up earlier. I decided a few days before April that I would get up at 5AM and write my 800 words right after waking up, which was a personal decision which worked very well in a getting a routine sort of way, but I know from experience that I write best at night. What works is something that you need to fiddle with, is it better to do something that gets you to do it every day or to do something that gives you the best words to work with? What’s important is routine, which is why I opt to start a little early by writing everyday at least a week in advance. My routine has been a little too sporadic this past week, meaning that some days I didn’t top even three hundred words, but this week I’m trying to tighten that up. I’m going to try get up and go to bed at more regular times to discourage procrastination and make a specific time to write and make sure I do it at my desk or arm chair since I tend to meander less in those environments.

 

As for my NaNoWriMo survival supplies, I’m just about prepared. I’m not a coffee drinker, so I opt for tea since it’s an excuse to walk away for a little bit and come back. I tend to recommend water since, and this sounds ridiculous, but, writing is thirsty work. I recommend staying away from snacks during this season since they require you to remove your hands from your writing, but something sweet that you can suck on like lifesavers can be a real lifesaver. I also have an array of stress toys, slinkys, and bouncy balls for times when I need to focus on what to write next and a playlist of music that doesn’t distract me. Basically in the way of supplies, get stuff that can help you focus and doesn’t distract you.

 

Another thing that helps me is writing vlogs. Motivation to keep writing is crucial in a month long spree, especially if you aren’t used to writing a lot every day. You may run into dead ends or feel like you’re writing is bad or that you don’t know how to write something, which is usually when I turn to writing vlogs. I like Katytastic, because she has a lot of NaNoWriMo vlogs, which focus on the stress of writing like this. It helps me get into the writing mood before I start, like a pep talk before a fight, it can help you get into the flow quicker and remind you that other people are having trouble too.

 

Lastly, I want to address cabins. Those of you who haven’t participated before may not know, but Camp NaNoWriMo has cabins, in which a group of people work together to do their individual projects. In the past this hasn’t been particularly helpful for me, since I tend to be the one who pep talks other people, but it’s nice to have a group of people who can give you suggestions and remind you that it’s okay if you miss a goal, but keep moving forward. We will also have a group goal in our Writing Club cabin, which we can all try to meet together. Which reminds me that I will likely have a big addition the first day of camp since I’m a big ol’ cheater and I don’t like subtracting numbers from my project info every time I update my word count, so don’t worry about that, it’s just annoying not too. I’m adjusting my goal to fit accordingly, so I’m not a total cheater, I’m still pushing myself.

 

So good luck NaNoWriMo writers, I’m proud of all ya’ll and I will be there to give confusing pep talks and rambling stories just like on the website and in person. See you there!

 

BTW Cabin is under my name (llama-overlord), so look for me or message me or email me and I’ll add you in.

(Some) Outlining Methods Pros and Cons

Outlines are not everybody’s thing. I know that, but they can be incredibly useful. I’ve said before that I wasn’t an outlining kind of writer when I first started, mostly because I didn’t know it was an option, but I’ve come around a bit and I’ve been testing out how to effectively outline this past year or so.

 

There are a couple of reasons I’ve done this, first being that I was getting stuck. I would write myself into a situation that had to be a certain way because of character traits and decisions made earlier in the story and because of said situation I was forced to go in a certain direction that I didn’t want to go in because it was either that or do a total rewrite. In short, I was stuck in a loop of starting over and over and over until I lost interest. Outlining doesn’t necessarily fix that problem entirely, but it helps test the waters for things that may be problems and helps me direct my characters away from directions I don’t want to go. I find that it also helps me write faster since I’m not spending as much time wondering what I should do next, and it helps me get hyped about my story. It’s not a sure-fire thing, but it’s certainly preventative.

 

I think there’s a misconception, which a lot of people have about the outline, that it’s a set in stone contract or a walkthrough of your story. The truth is that you may not even use the outline at all, you may simply make it and never touch it again because it may have already fulfilled its purpose to you. The point of an outline is to get you to think about your story before you actually write it. Brian A. Klems puts it this way in his article “Choosing the Best Outline Method for You” in Writer’s Digest:

 

“Think of it, perhaps, as a recipe. You can follow a recipe exactly for, say, a cheesecake, or you can add a bit of chocolate to the batter, and poof—chocolate cheesecake! Or, you can add a graham cracker crust and some cherries to the top, and you’ve got a different version of the same classic. Recipes guide us—but the creativity still belongs to the head chef.”

 

So, if you’re convinced, and you want to start using outlines, you may be wondering “What the fuck do I do now?” And I might respond “That is a very good question, I was hoping you could tell me.” Just as there is no one way to use an outline, there is no one way to make an outline. Here are a few ways people suggest you go about it, and some pros and cons to each strategy:

 

  1. The Expanding Outline (aka The Snowflake Method):

 

The idea with this one is that you start with your basic premise

 

Ex. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water

 

Then you keep expanding and adding more details to it

 

Ex. Jack the seventh son of a seventh son with his twin sister Jill must hike up the mount Hecuba to retrieve the water of youth to heal their sick mother. à Jack the seventh son of a seventh son with his twin sister Jill must hike up the mount Hecuba to retrieve the water of youth to heal their sick mother, because they are the only one’s powerful enough to defeat wicked Zolo. Zolo almost kills them several times (with his henchmen, his giant hawk, and with his turtle Steve), but Jack and Jill persevere and face Zolo for one final battle when Jack falls from the mountain, leaving Jill to follow him down quickly or perish. ETC.

 

More information here.

 

Pros:

  • Helps identify the places that need expanding
  • Can be used on the micro and macro level.

Cons:

  • Long
  • Not simple

 

  1. Summary:

 

This one’s easy. Just start writing the story but summarize the conversations and scenes.

 

Pros:

  • Straight forward
  • Easy to follow after it’s done

Cons:

  • Not good for much brainstorming
  • May have to do it several times

 

  1. Skeletal Outline:

 

This is the one most people think of when they think of outlines. It’s like when you were a kid in elementary school and they made you do those outlines for essays that have the class hated more than writing the actual essay. You basically just use a story common story structure and plug in elements of your story

 

Pros:

  • Easy to follow
  • Easy to organize and reorganize
  • Bird’s eye view
  • Helps identify key elements

Cons:

  • Dull
  • May have to try different story structures out

 

  1. Free-Writing:

 

This is method I use a lot with in my outlining process. It’s basically just doing a dry-run of the story with low attention to detail. I use this when I have no ideas, but I think that writing will help me think clearer.

 

Pros:

  • Intuitive
  • Engaging
  • Good brainstorming

Cons:

  • Not easy to follow
  • May cause you to get lost or too focused on small details
  • May not help with the flow of the piece

 

  1. Contextual Preperation:

 

This one I think should just me standard if you’re writing a story. It’s not outlining the story elements or plot, just hammering out details about the world and the characters. What are the politics, climate, history, ruling class, etc. of the world and what are your characters’ motivations, fears, habits, ticks, appearances, history, etc..

 

Pros:

  • You know what every element of the world will and won’t do
  • Good brainstorming
  • Good reference
  • Good descriptions
  • Good for pantsers
  • Goos motivation
  • You will probably use this

Cons:

  • Long
  • Not step-by-step
  • No plot

 

  1. 3 Act 9 Part 27 Chapter Outline:

 

This is a basic structure that I’ve used before, more information here. You can manipulate the details, but it gives you points to touch on.

 

More information here.

 

Pros:

  • Step-by-step
  • Good for making sure you touch on why things are happening and how your main character is influencing the plot

Cons:

  • Dull
  • Need to make sure your chapters flow
  • Maybe not the layout you want

 

  1. Notecard Method:

 

Honestly I don’t understand this one. I think it’s useful if you have elements you want and don’t want to commit to a place for them yet. You can use notecards to move around elements easily. More information here.

 

Pros:

  • Easy to manipulate
  • Easy to follow when it’s done

Cons:

  • Long
  • Not easy in the brainstorming stage

 

Camp NaNoWriMo Cabin

Hey y’all, the cabin has been created, if you want to join us this July for NaNoWriMo, please get in contact with me through the Camp NaNoWriMo website, my email, or the Contact Us page with your Camp NaNoWriMo username to get added to the cabin.

June is Outlining Month (and also updates on Camp NaNoWriMo and more)

Hey y’all! I know I’m a little early, but I’d like to welcome you all to June, which is unofficially outlining month. Since July is going to be Camp NaNoWriMo, it seems pertinent in this next month to address the outlining for those of you who believe in outlining or those, like me, are focused on learning the skill and craft of the outline.

 

I’ve touched on my outlining experiences before on the site, but this month I want to focus on ways people suggest you should outline, the pros and cons of these methods, helpful programs for outlining, and, most importantly, things to look out for in your outline. I will be working with my current outlines this month (as well as getting myself mentally prepared for writing everyday), so if anything comes up, you might get some personal anecdotes as well this month.

 

Also, if you’re interested in joining our little Camp in July, I will post when Cabins open on the Camp NaNoWriMo site, so when they do you can join us online. Anyone is free to join us, in the club or not, so feel free to invite friends. Usually NaNoWriMo is set at a 50,000-word target, but Camp is set your own goal (basically the idea is to just write everyday), so if you’re worried about time and stress, this is a “at your own pace” kind of thing. No judgement and no penalties. Also camp isn’t all about novels, you can choose to edit or write poetry or short stories, so if you’re interested in stretching your writing muscles in a different style, by all means go ahead.

 

June is also pride month, so just a small reminder to be inclusive and open to new ideas or characters to add to your story. I’ve been thinking about talking to the Wooster QSU+ about queer character representation, maybe we could do a discussion with them when school starts up again since I know we have a lot of overlap and good character development comes from knowing the pitfalls. If anyone is interested in that please get in contact with me, either now or during the school year so we could work something out.

 

That’s all the updates for now. Thank you for checking in and please keep tuned in for more, and I’m always open to other people posting on the site, so if anyone’s interested please email me and I’ll be glad to give you access.

Reading my old writing like: “Did I used to be good at this?”

Hey y’all, I have something to confess today: I have a bad habit. Sometimes when I can’t write, I reread my old writing. And I know I shouldn’t because I’m in the drafting phase when all that matters is moving forward, but I can’t help myself. Sometimes it’s a cringey experience like rereading my actual published novel which describes my main character’s period cramps as something that’s so bad she can’t even leave the bathroom long enough to solve the murder she’s been hired to solve (…*facepalm*), something which I only confess to you in the hopes that you will understand why I am so uncomfortable with the fact that my entire immediate family and some of my high school friends’ parents have read this. This is my life… I cannot even with that book. However, on some occasions I reread what I’ve written and I’m swept away into this world that I created, and I think “wow, that was actually good.”

 

I think I hate this more.

 

It’s like: “Did I used to be good at this?” Honestly, rereading the short story which my current project Roots is based off of, I’m amazed at what I did. Sure there are things I don’t like about it, but it engages me in a way that my writing for the Roots novel doesn’t. So my question is: why? Is it just because this is a longer project? Or because the subject matter isn’t as engaging as the actual climax of my novel? Or is it the outlining? Is it because changing my writing patterns and methods dried out my work? Was I better off as a pantser?

 

I’ll be the first to say that I believe in outlining. I think it’s made it a lot easier to jump into my work and keep it going, but I can’t help but to wonder if I still need to adjust the way I go about drafting to this new method. I don’t know how to change that, but I know that I need to do something to adjust my writing style back to the way it used to be a few months ago, without going back to the older me who clearly didn’t know what she was doing.

Cheating On My Draft with My Ex-Manuscript

Hey y’all, I’ve been taking a few days off from writing, by which I mean I slept in until 4pm a couple of days ago.

 

I said in my last update that I was reworking my outline for my current project “Roots,” and that’s how I started. You see the reason I’m so intent on finishing Roots is because I have this other project that I started back in middle school which has gone through several renditions to say the least. I might post some of the crappy old drafts sometime later, but the point is that it’s a piece I keep going back too. I work on it when I’m feeling down or like I can’t write other projects. It’s actually the first piece I ever outlined, and it’s usually where I go when I try a new technique or method since I have a lot of the world figured out.

 

Last night I was about to look at my Roots outline when I started thinking about my Old Faithful project and a few of the ideas I’d come up with. Somehow I ended up pulling up the Scrivener document and working with the character sheets until about 1AM. Somehow, I don’t know, maybe witchcraft or something (I was bound by its sneaky allure and forced to write (how dare it)). Like I said before, I’m not good with structured outlining fill in the blank sheets. I find them hard to navigate and a little unnecessary. Scrivener comes pre-programed with one of these in its character sheets. I have it pictured below so you can see what I’m talking about:

 

Scrivener Character sheet

Scrivener Character sheet

(Shhhh! Steam isn’t open in the background there while I’m typing this out). Anyway, it’s not that long and pretty open ended, so I’ve used it a few times when I outlined Roots the third time, but It’s not really the way my head works. I think the point is more to think about these sort of details before you right so you don’t suddenly change how a character acts or looks rather than as a reference.

What I worked on last night was these character sheets because I wanted to flush out my antagonists for the story (or rather have antagonists since I didn’t find the ones in my last draft all that compelling). I started with images, since I already know my characters well enough to know what characteristics they need to have to signify personalities or to demonstrate how they move. Pictures help me since my in-head writing is very visually oriented and pictures help me stay grounded or test out different ideas I’m weighing. Here is the corkboard mode on Scrivener with my character sheets:

Hope's Character Sheets for Storyteller

Hope’s Character Sheets for Storyteller

I focused a lot on facial expressions since I don’t tend to focus a lot on physical details when I write (I’m more focused on movements or the main details). Jaime, who’s main character, doesn’t really look all that much like Hermione Granger, but she has some basic details I wanted like long brown hair and the right age range (finding character models is difficult for non-mainstream body types, skin tones, or young women). Ideally my character model would be a little chubbier and have a braid, but I had to make sacrifices. The facial expression was more why I picked her; I found it the right tone for inspiring some major details about her, and I’m willing to stake a few physical details from the character model here as well.

 

I then moved into other main characters in order of importance to the plot (or in the order that I remembered them). Which led me to the last main character I had yet to outline: my antagonist. He’s the only character I don’t know a lot about, but I’d been running through a few ideas. I have no idea what it or they look like so I start plugging my ideas in one at a time and I run across one image I like so I look for images like that one and end up on this one:

 

Skull Creature by Kazenra (taken from their DeviantArt page)

Skull Creature by Kazenra (taken from their DeviantArt page)

What I like about this one is, again, the face. And it’s like magic. I know exactly what I want this character to be like. So I applied one of the methods I used for my Roots outline which is basically writing about the thing like it’s the Wikipedia page version and that’s my outline for the character.

 

So that’s how I cheated on my current project and I’m not sure if I’m going to set Roots aside because eventually something I’m proud of has to be finished, but I think I’ll keep working on both outlines and decide which one I’ll use for Camp NaNoWriMo this year.

Are Your Hands Wet?