Setting Course
June 14, 2000
7:38 a.m.
I stayed downstairs last night and finished what I think are the last bits of "Universe Three." Lisa will read it today (I think) and let me know if I right. [grin] Brigid and Lisa sat upstairs while I was working. They watched The Phantom Menace, specifically looking for little oddities Lisa has picked up over the past few months through various Internet and other contacts. Every few minutes they would laugh. At some points it was hard to concentrate because I was enjoying just listening to them so much. Lisa is a gloriously fantastic mom.   Lisa Silverthorne sits down before every story she writes and scribbles out a letter to herself. In this letter, she focuses on what she wants to say and accomplish with the story. I tried this for the first time while I was struggling with what eventually became "The Taranth Stone" and found that it really helped focus my mind. Since then, I've taken the approach and adapted it to my own way of thinking. So I didn't put any "productive" words down today--meaning that I made no wordcount progress. Instead, I broke out each of the five active characters or organizations involved in the story at this point, and wrote a freeform paragraph or three about their motivations, and their actions as the story progresses. In other words, I developed five intertwining storylines--well, I cannot tell a lie ... I really only developed four storylines since the fifth is an off-screen player at this point of the story, but will come back into play in the next installment or two! This is really a great deal of fun. There are no right or wrong answers at this moment, you understand? Instead, I'm truly playing with characters and situations--putting things together and then stepping back and saying "Hmmmm ... cute, but you know Torrance would never do that." Or "Hummm...gonna be a little slow here, better add a little intrigue ... now which of these motley crew is best suited to make things worse?" So now I understand the inner working of the story, the character dynamics and the reasons different groups do different things. With luck I've got a complete story that takes the baton from the last and carries it forward to the next. If I tell it right, it sets up what follows. This, I think, is the essence of writing. People get caught up in the gaudy chase for numbers, and they judge people on whether they write fast or not (and make assorted assumptions on what the quality of that work must be like) without really thinking about the underlying infrastructure. When I know a story backward and forward, I write really fast. When I don't I struggle. I like writing fast. It keeps my brain going, and brings out my creative side. But I can't do it (at least not effectively) if I don't know what the story is going to be about before I write it. That's when I write slow (see "Out of the Blue"). But today I'm pleased. I've got the entire story developed. I've got the start that I wrote a day or three ago (which needs to be severely modified to fit into what the final story will be, but served to get me into the right frame of mind), and I've got a clear idea of what the following two stories will be about. Can't ask for anything better than that. Now I just have to make them happen on the page.  There's the rub, though, Ron Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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