我要飞Faye

I stopped talking about the novel, because a) it was past NaNo, b) I read a post saying that writing about writing only took away the time from the actual writing, and c) I accidentally led myself into a ditch, because I was rereading my old notes and realised I forgot a central theme of my old novel: humans have to be saved from their own imagination. Because imagination, like fire, is a good servant but a bad master.

But on the flipside, I tend to read a lot of DW/LJ/blog posts when writing, and sometimes they help to unstick things in my brain. Then, because I forgot where I read it I can't explain how they got unstuck (see: the thing I mentioned two posts ago.)

So I thought I'd write this down before I forgot. I was reading a complaint about generic mermaid plots, which was broadly described as the following: "[girl who doesn't fit in] [meets mysterious boy] [discovers she must save an undersea kingdom]".

Since I was working on the novel, I immediately went to compare my current plotline to this. It fits the first two, [girl who (somewhat) doesn't fit in (at funky workplace dealing with dreams)][meets mysterious boy (at funky workplace)]. But on the last part, my heroine doesn't exactly save anything, not even the mysterious boy. In fact, she's a little responsible for temporarily breaking reality...

Then I realised that I could take the "inherent" traits in heroines of mermaid tales (or even princess tales) - traits of royal/mermaid/royal mermaid blood and honour and beauty and grace (how much these are linked are up to the author) - which the heroine forgot/didn't know about, and twist it a little. My heroine could have put a little too much spark of life into one of her previous dreams and forgotten about it... and now she has to fix her mistake.

At least, this is how the idea formed in my head. We'll see how it executes in the story itself.

By now this is my third year doing NaNo. 50k of words is a good target to aim for, but when you're working full time on top of writing it's a pretty sure fire way to burn out, or even fall sick.

This year I knew my day job was going to be pretty hectic and there was no way I was going to make about 1.7k of words a day. I needed a better plan.

Then I read this tumblr post about just writing 350 words a day. And taking two days off! This sounded like something I was capable of.

I'd been doing 750 words before that, so 350 words was a pretty easy target to hit. But not maxing out my word count also allowed me to dedicate other words to other areas. Plotting. World building that hadn't occurred to me. Rounding out new characters that had popped up.

So I'm pretty satisfied with using a 350 word count as a base, and counting everything else as a step up.

I read this post about writing as a craft and melannen's response to it, and well. The first link to me makes me rage, because I am not a huge fan of the "writing is such a mythical process" and the "you either got it or you don't~~~" and I'm just old and I keep waving my canes at the kids on the lawn ok?

But melannen is awesome and her tips are awesome, so that inspired me to write some tips of my own. I know that I'm thinking about writing all the time (even at... work...) and that some of the exercises I do are such second nature to me now. I even go about my dreams in a writerly way!

So here are some of the exericses that I do to improve my writing, in no particular order.

1) Analysing your kinks, and writing out your favourite versions
2) Analysing your reactions to media - what works for you, and why?
2a) writing out quotes lists

I'm a very emotional person. So my favourite kinks and favourite scene draw out such reactions in me that even surprise myself! So I have the habit of analysing my kinks and how I react to media. What made me happy? Happy enough that I would clap my hands? What made me rage? Did I want to walk out? It didn't take much thinking to wonder if I could replicate those seal-clappy moments in my fic, and avoid the rage stomping type of things.

I put quotes as a subset because it's one thing to react to events, but another to react to writing enough that you think about replicating it in your writing. Only two authors have driven me to write down quotes.

To me, it's similiar to learning how the masters play music in order to perform in a similiar or same way. The reactions is about the mood, and the quotes are about the technique.


3) Thinking about writing. E.g. mulling over the story in the train.
4) Observation, and maybe writing it out (writing sketches)
5) Writing down lists of things that you like. E.g. I want to work the sound of thunder rattling glass into a story

These three are about working on writing on the go, especially when you have a busy schedule that doesn't let you do anything else. A lot of these don't even need anything more than pen and paper (or a phone in this digital age).

Quick lists are the key for my inspiration in that I can be inspired by anything, notice where my inspiration comes from, or in some cases revisit something that inspired me but I didn't have time then to expand.


6) Shopping for characters/doll makers
7) Learning the difference between observation and visualisation, and practising the latter more, esp with fantasy/sci-fi stories

These are a bit more deliberate, but also about inspiration and making the jump to actual things that would appear in novels. E.g. How does clothing reflect character? How do I turn the image in my head into something workable and doesn't change geography/the laws of physics (unless that's the point).


8) Practise writing starting lines: hooks, setting the scene, giving yourself a springboard to write
9) Figuring out where your natural stopping points are. Writing over them
10) Idea of puppy pound and learning how to write with the idea that nothing is sacred, and to cut without feeling pain
11) Finding out what annoys you. E.g. blank pages are my nemesis

These are a bit more on the writing technique itself, but they are on very different points of writing technique.


Edit: I found this too, and YES YES YES this is completely what writing consciously is all about: http://lightgetsin.dreamwidth.org/326659.html