20,264 on Transformation last night, and moving right along. Vlad impressed me. That's hard to do. :)
The funny thing currently is the title--it stemmed from the prologue, but there are other characters transforming as well. So it's fitting all around.
I'm curious as to how other people write, but when I see that a lot of people use outlines (and stick to them) I wonder just how that works, creativity-wise. I know that my subconscious/muse/ or wherever the stories come from can't work from an outline. If the story's going well, then I may know what happens next, but I won't know what happens after that until I write what happens next. If I was ever required to submit an outline before writing the book, I wouldn't be able to do it. I write like I read (unless you're one of the people who flip forward *grin*), only I can't flip forward to see if someone lives in the end. I don't know.
And sometimes they surprise even me. That's what derailed SYWTBAV twice--because they delivered these two surprises into my lap and I had no idea what to do with them.
Writing like this is the closest thing I can get to real life for my characters. After all, none of us knows what will happen tomorrow. We think we know; we know what should happen tomorrow based on what has happened in the past or schedules we think we have to obey, but there's no guarantee at all. The outlines of our lives are incomplete, broken things. Why, then, do writers insist on controlling their stories so completely? Is it because they can't *really* control their own lives? It makes me wonder.
I have a medium-long list of things to do today--I didn't get a lot done this weekend, but I did make a couple of decisions that needed to be made. (I sometimes wonder if I'll remember what decisions they were years from now when I reread this blog, but most of the time, I do.) They were good decisions, in truth. And they needed to be thought about.
One of the decisions is to spend more time out in the woods this year, taking pictures and just allowing the solitude and the beauty around me to strengthen my resolve on a lot of things.
What do I need to be happy? Evidently not much. More on that later. :)
The funny thing currently is the title--it stemmed from the prologue, but there are other characters transforming as well. So it's fitting all around.
I'm curious as to how other people write, but when I see that a lot of people use outlines (and stick to them) I wonder just how that works, creativity-wise. I know that my subconscious/muse/ or wherever the stories come from can't work from an outline. If the story's going well, then I may know what happens next, but I won't know what happens after that until I write what happens next. If I was ever required to submit an outline before writing the book, I wouldn't be able to do it. I write like I read (unless you're one of the people who flip forward *grin*), only I can't flip forward to see if someone lives in the end. I don't know.
And sometimes they surprise even me. That's what derailed SYWTBAV twice--because they delivered these two surprises into my lap and I had no idea what to do with them.
Writing like this is the closest thing I can get to real life for my characters. After all, none of us knows what will happen tomorrow. We think we know; we know what should happen tomorrow based on what has happened in the past or schedules we think we have to obey, but there's no guarantee at all. The outlines of our lives are incomplete, broken things. Why, then, do writers insist on controlling their stories so completely? Is it because they can't *really* control their own lives? It makes me wonder.
I have a medium-long list of things to do today--I didn't get a lot done this weekend, but I did make a couple of decisions that needed to be made. (I sometimes wonder if I'll remember what decisions they were years from now when I reread this blog, but most of the time, I do.) They were good decisions, in truth. And they needed to be thought about.
One of the decisions is to spend more time out in the woods this year, taking pictures and just allowing the solitude and the beauty around me to strengthen my resolve on a lot of things.
What do I need to be happy? Evidently not much. More on that later. :)
Comments
Oh, the one exception was the two Three-Day Novels I wrote. I stuck to the outline because I was writing too fast to let the story grow, I think.
I start in the middle, with scenes that unfold vividly in my head. Then I stitch them together with narrative.