Not NaNoWriMo
I'm not doing NaNoWriMo -- it's actually pure coincidence that I started working a regular writing stint into my daily schedule this week. It ended up not being any of the pre-existing writing projects languishing in a drawer (or computer file). Instead, what spurred me to the deed was the desire to capture a particular moment of my story-creating process. Most of my novel ideas grow in some way out of what I think of as the back-of-the-eyelids movie -- the little stories I run through my head to put myself to sleep. Some of them are intended only and always to be internal stories, others have eventually evolved into something I've put down on paper. Some have split into multiple versions with an internal and external face that go in different directions. But there's a period in the creation process where the story development is cresting like a breaking wave and I'm elaborating lots of details and scenes as I run them over and over behind the eyelids, and then the wave moves on to a later part of the story and I find that I can't always get back and recapture all the details of the earlier development. For the internal-only stories, eventually it resolves into a pared-down template of the story (sort of like the pruning away of unused neural connections in childhood) which gets re-elaborated when I pull it out to run it in my head. But the best, freshest, and most detailed version of the story is the one riding that wave crest like a surfer at Mavericks.
So I'd started a new eyelid movie recently -- partly as a spin-off of a couple of books I'd read that happened not to be the books I wanted to have read, although it's in no way a retelling or fan-fic of any of them. It's currently at the stage where the participants are revealing themselves and their relationships, where the initial crisis that starts the action occurs, and where the stage is set in vague terms for the eventual resolution but the path to achieve it is completely hidden. I've run the initial scenes a few times and they're starting to crystalize nicely. And this time I wanted to try standing up on that surfboard and trying to keep just ahead of the curl to see how far I can ride it. So each night before I go to sleep, I rehearse the next little bit a few times. And over my lunch hour I scribble out a few longhand pages. And then just before I go to sleep I type them up on the laptop. (I'm once again finding that I have a much easier time composing longhand than directly on the computer when it's all brand new.) I might give occasional progress reports, but I'm not likely to talk about the specific story much because -- for me -- that tends to make the story leak out and spill all over the floor rather than onto the paper like it belongs. But I've achieved another one of my Life Cleaning goals -- I've integrated regular writing into my weekly schedule, and it feels good.
So I'd started a new eyelid movie recently -- partly as a spin-off of a couple of books I'd read that happened not to be the books I wanted to have read, although it's in no way a retelling or fan-fic of any of them. It's currently at the stage where the participants are revealing themselves and their relationships, where the initial crisis that starts the action occurs, and where the stage is set in vague terms for the eventual resolution but the path to achieve it is completely hidden. I've run the initial scenes a few times and they're starting to crystalize nicely. And this time I wanted to try standing up on that surfboard and trying to keep just ahead of the curl to see how far I can ride it. So each night before I go to sleep, I rehearse the next little bit a few times. And over my lunch hour I scribble out a few longhand pages. And then just before I go to sleep I type them up on the laptop. (I'm once again finding that I have a much easier time composing longhand than directly on the computer when it's all brand new.) I might give occasional progress reports, but I'm not likely to talk about the specific story much because -- for me -- that tends to make the story leak out and spill all over the floor rather than onto the paper like it belongs. But I've achieved another one of my Life Cleaning goals -- I've integrated regular writing into my weekly schedule, and it feels good.