The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: story development

  • NaNoWriMo #6 part two

    2013-Participant-Square-ButtonI was supposed to post this yesterday but things conspired to help me forget. Nothing bad, though, just life which gets in the way of everything that needs to be done, right?

    At the beginning of this I set a daily word count goal of 2000 per day and as an average I’ve hit that. However there’ve been a couple of days when I didn’t make that mark. Luckily there’ve been several days when I far exceeded that mark and thus I’m at 21,767 words in nine days. Not too shabby, eh?

    Yesterday, instead of posting here as I was supposed to, I wrote over 3100 words which made up for one day where I only wrote 1300 and one day I wrote 1700 plus a little extra. At the end of the day I checked my progress this year versus the last couple of years and I’m on pace, or just a little behind, where I’ve been. The conclusion I came to is that when I’m in NaNoWriMo, blasting away at the story that will eventually be shaped by revision, rewrite and rethinking into a novel, I’m pretty consistent.

    So that’s the process part of where I’m at this year. How about the story? I can hear one of you ask. (more…)

  • Panning for Gold in the Dark

    A couple of weeks back the fabulous Confabulators weighed in on where their writing ideas come from.  I may backtrack a bit over some of that territory, because where they come from seems to be connected to the ideas I end up pursuing past the ‘idea’ stage.

    Looking back on the thousands of words I’ve written, I sort of see this pattern: for a novel or short story, what usually what gets me going, and keeps me engaged, is something I’m struggling to understand in my own life.

    For example:

    ~The aftermath of the unexplained death of my father became a short story about the changing relationship of two brothers, as one pulls away from what’s left of his family.

    ~Trying to understand marriage became a novel exploring the lives of a girl traded into white slavery and a man raised in the 1960’s “who did everything right and failed.”

    ~The idea of refuge and the families we make became a novel about the friendships between gay theater kids in college and their circle of friends (‘Fame meets Boogie Nights’.)

    ~Addiction, the allure of escapism, and personal betrayals (both perpetrated and experienced) became a book about a young girl’s search for her birth parents in an alternate reality. (more…)

  • Editing: Just saying ‘no’

    Kerouac scroll
    Even Jack Kerouac — who purportedly wrote On the Road in three weeks on a scroll of taped-together paper — still took time to edit his work.

    It’s never easy to tell yourself “no.”

    We live in a world where we we are programmed to eat large portions, fill our wish lists with the latest gadgets and toys, and give in to every impulse buy imaginable. So it’s difficult to show restraint and say no. Especially in one’s own writing.

    As a writer, it’s necessary to explore ideas. Every character, every line of dialogue, every situation has the potential to be something great. Many writers (I’m looking at you, poets!) think every word is essential and each description is pure gold. In the end, some are good, others… well, not so much.

    But I’m not only a writer. I’m also an editor. I have to edit my work, and the editor in me is much less likely to put up with the falderal that the writer in me indulges.

    As much as it pains me, sometimes things in my writing don’t work. When that happens, I have to decide if it’s worthwhile to fix it, or whether I should just cut it and move on. The key to avoiding wasted time is to develop the story before I even begin to write.

    (more…)