Work In Progress!

Work In Progress

My WIP saw actual progress over the last two days. It’s Spring Break here for the kids and they were already crying they were bored by lunchtime yesterday. Today, I further taxed their powers of self-entertainment by taking them with me to get the tires on the van looked at. The guy told me, “I don’t usually say this to customers, but that’s a really dangerous tire to be driving on. Good thing you came in when you did.” Yeah, duly chastised and a thousand bucks poorer thanks to extended warranties, new shocks & struts and there better be some gold plating under there too! Noted. I’ll be back every 3-5 months to get them rotated and aligned now. Aye-aye.

Anyway, I managed to fill out my outline spreadsheet based on Dunne’s Emotional Structure and Vogler’s take on the Hero’s Journey, as well as a few other things I’ve tossed in by now. I finished Act I and Act II’s outline yesterday and finished up Act III today at the tire place. If they’d had a decent table to work on and I hadn’t had the kids, I might have been REALLY productive during the three hours we were there.

I also worked a bit brainstorming on names for characters and the like that I’ll need before I can really sit down and write this thing, but I’m so close that I’m starting to feel annoyed when I can’t take a chunk of time and devote to it and get it out of my system. This is a good thing. There’s a sense of urgency that I need to work on this and get the story told. I’d missed that feeling lately.

All I have to do now is strap myself into my chair and get writing! I’m sure I’ll become a regular feature in the RD chat room again. (Sorry Bria, no nifty anaolgies today. I’m too braindead from smelling the rubber in the showroom/waiting room and a FOXNEWS overload.)

Thanks and Possible Breakthrough

First off, I want to thank everyone for their birthday wishes yesterday!

I had a great day and we went out for Japanese for dinner for something different that the kids and I’d never had before: Shabu Shabu, which is named for the “swish” sound the meat makes when you drag it through the boiling water.

So what’s this have to do with a breakthrough? Not much, really. Except that I’ve been looking at this story as a single big chunk of meat plopped down on the counter. Wrong. It needs to be sliced thinly to bring out the marbling, the texture and flavor. It needs a variety of veggies on the side to season it. And most importantly, it needs that pot of boiling water to steep in, to meld everything together into something tasty and new.

Dare I hope that by forcing myself to face this story head-on this week (see boiling pot reference), I’ve managed to push through past the stale synopsis on Wikipedia to something interesting, fun, and that will qualify as a romance (see the something tasty and new reference)?

What I realized is that everything I’ve done so far has been solely for my benefit. The majority of what I’ve cluttered up my brain, blog and hard drive with regarding this story so far will never see the page in the final story. I don’t consider it wasted time at all because I had to know it and work through it to find the story that was hiding underneath.

Unfortunately, what I did realize is that I’ve mostly abandoned the approach I was trying to take. I still think it’s very puzzle-like in trying to determine what goes where, what A means for B, and why C has to happen before D can. But thinking about the “layout” and who and what need to populate the story have been pushed aside in my quest to find the story I want to write itself.

Now that I have an overview of what I want to do (and it might not look like it contains all the same plot points as before, but they’re still bouncing around my head and woven in and around what is there. The original folktale seems to be mostly backstory and supporting details for the hero’s storyline, but the heroine is taking over the show and what the story is about has changed because of the decisions I’ve forced the characters to make and the histories I’ve given them.

So, back to swishing these poor characters around. Mmm… it’s starting to look like soup… I mean a story! What do you think?

Alexander can’t help helping others and when he learns a woman has been kidnapped from the old gypsy woman he rescued from a ditch, things start to go wrong. He finds the woman, but Anthea refuses to leave before she can recover the key to her father’s breeding program that was stolen by her “captives”. Meanwhile, the matriarch plans to force Anthea into marriage with her eldest son because of her own impeccable bloodline. Eventually, Alex figures out that he needs a little outside help in order to help solve Anthea’s problems and that he likes her as she is. Alex and Anthea manage to escape with the key but the family pursues them. Will society’s notions of propriety trap her forever or will true love free her to be her self.

Oh, and you can expect to hear a lot more about a couple of my presents in the future: DH got me Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting and my mom got me a copy of Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles & Ends.

More Structural Designs

My son’s Cub Scout Pack spent the weekend camping in the cold and windy mountains. No incidents involved wild critters, but at night, we could hear the wolves howling at the nearby preserve. The boys had a great time imitating them.

We left home later than we’d hoped, so I put up the tent (mostly by myself) in the dark as DH lugged our gear up the steep path from the car. Others often tease us about our “hotel” tent, but once you put two air mattresses, all our stuff plus four people inside, our eight-man (or is that sardine?) tent just holds us.

It amazes me how some nylon fabric, six poles and twelve stakes provide sufficient shelter. Understanding the design determines how much effort you spend getting it up. Some tents ALMOST work, even if you get the wrong pole in the wrong sleeve. One of my friends had this issue Friday night. It looked like a tent and even acted like one, but she doubted it would withstand the expected winds. Luckily, it held, but it could have fallen apart on her and her son during the night.

So, what does all this have to do with writing, you ask?

After reading the first two parts of Dunne’s book, Emotional Structure: Creating the Story Beneath the Plot, while recovering yesterday afternoon, I realized I’m missing the stakes and poles in my writing or possibly I have only used stakes and poles, with no canvas between them. Hmmm, I haven’t worked that analogy out very well. Anyway, what I had written looked like a story, but it collapsed under close reading.

Dunne’s book is written as a guide for screenwriters, but his ideas apply to any type of fiction, especially character-driven fiction – like romance novels. He describes sowing the seeds of your story so you end up with complex characters with rich backstories that allow the plot to reveal patterns in the life of your protagonist – the personification of your theme.

I never quite understood what theme meant. The difference between story and plot always struck me as a semantic one. However, I felt these concepts click into place after reading Dunne’s quote, “The story is the journey for truth. The plot is the road it takes to get there.” I’ve read similar things recently, but not in a way that made sense.

Jodi and Jasmine recognized many seeds (even a couple I didn’t consciously drop) in the story I had buried in my head during this draft. However, for my story to work, I need to determine what truth (theme) I’m trying to reveal to the reader and build from there. Therefore, this week’s plan is to finish the book and work on Dunne’s exercises with respect to this story.

Architecture of Emotion

I got some phenomenal feedback on Revealed from several Divas. Jodi suggested some great websites: Michael Hauge’s article Screenplay Structure and The Unknown Screenwriter’s article on Transformational Character Arcs. She also recommended the book Emotional Structure: Creating the Story Beneath the Plot by Emmy award winning TV producer Peter Dunne, which has me itching to dig more into the architecture of emotion.

Jasmine also gave me excellent feedback much in the same vein – a need to see more justification behind the actions shown.

People (Hi, Bria and Jennifer!) have also said it needs to be longer. I’m good at making things over complicated. Considering the female lead was pulled from an abandoned novel idea, trying to fit her story in 1k words and even ending up with 2400 didn’t give it room to fully bloom. More experienced writers could probably pull it off, but not me.

This building characters from the ground up in a static medium is MUCH trickier than constructing them with more outright “told” and emergent behaviors that I’m so used to doing for online role playing games. So, it’s back to the drawing board (or at least will be after a weekend of camping with no ‘net) and burying my nose in theory again.

The best laid plans…

fighting mouse I’m not sure if my plan is going to work. Yesterday, I worked on a story arc for another story idea that’s been around for a while. I spent far longer than 30 minutes on it and I didn’t get beyond than the set up and inciting incident.

I should probably start on one that I don’t already have any part written out. I ended up taking what I’d already written and trimmed it to 250 words and left it at that. My internal editor had a field day and, of course, once I got to the point where I’d previously stopped writing – SPLAT! Crash and burn, baby. Do not pass go; do not collect $200. There was a complete dead standstill in my brain.

I don’t know why I have a problem with that. I’ve run into it several times now. I’ve hit that same point in the Food Critic story as well. I stopped and now there seems to be a brick wall preventing me from moving forward in the story. On one hand, I suspect it has something to do with how thoroughly I’ve thought through a story. On the other, I haven’t made an explicit agreement with myself to come back to finish it. There’s also the likelihood that something shiny grabbed my attention in the meantime.

However, I need to make sure I try this exercise the way I planned and not give up so easily. Writing exercises done only in your head don’t accomplish anything. My friend, Bria of the Purple Hearts, commented on the previous post that she was learning a lot from me on process. I hope it’s not just lessons in what NOT to do. 🙂