Welp. I haven’t really written today. At least I don’t think I have. I’ve recently discovered apps that help plan books, so I’m like, “Scrap the first chapter and start writing in November. Plan everything ahead of time.” Just to mention, I’m committed to making an attempt at NaNoWriMo. Last time was hectic; this time, I’m going to use every moment of my free time to plan this book and write in November. So Preptember and Preptober, here I come. I think I get a digital badge for announcing this. This is social media, right?
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Why am I more interested in the dead character than I am in the living ones? LOL
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I stared at the wall today and saw my chapter go in one ear and out the other. Nothing written.
When total up all the writing I’ve done to date since 1st Jan this year = 357k I guess I can’t call myself a lazy writer.
And some of my writing is not published, since I was shadow-banned off the internet for most of the first half of this year.
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You ever reach that point in a story you’re writing where you know where you want to go with the narative, but don’t know how to get from point A to point B. I know what I want to happen, I just can’t figure out how to make it happen. It’s very frustrating, because it happens a lot to me while writing.
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Random Question:
If you could change 1 thing about your life, what would it be and why? (you could choose not to change btw 
)
I wish I have half of your determination
Every time I say I’ll write = uni comes to life and dumps assignments on my lap 
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I know right! I think I’ve fallen in love with Paranormal! 
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Constantly lol. It’s not very efficient but I find that having an imaginary conversation a la rubber ducky debugging helps the most.
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Because the dead shed some of their stupid.
I get there, sometimes. It’s really more that I want to get to the point and write the point rather than trudge through the drudgery.
just some thoughts on how to jar out of that
But traveling from point a to point b, sometimes it’s an issue of not knowing what to skip:
Say there’s a battle in a month…what are the everyday works that shouldn’t take up too much time:
Anything basic to preparation needs to be passingly addressed, at most:
Basic training, basic tactical, basic logistics, all piffle.
But a riot where the troops half damage themselves and there’s worries about recovery? Or the needed space mines aren’t in the inventory and your already stressed science and engineering departments are ready to mutiny because you’re having them work overtime on dangerous explosives? The men with the battle plan are certain the Captain’s way is going to kill us all? Needed plot points, shakes the security of the outcome. So, you figure out the order, how much time has passed, put the lead on doing something mundane and ritualistic towards battle that keeps getting interrupted for shenanigans.
And that’s a chapter that eats up a month of time between a to b without really making work for yourself. It’s the equivalent of a training montage in a movie.
But that’s a basic preparation. There’s other angles:
- Are they supposed to be prepared for the event? No?
You do a scene with the equivalence of a child saying “I’m bored” or “are we there yet?” And then abruptly jump to the point. If there’s really nothing that leads up to the point, you don’t waste time, just bring it along. All the “prep work” is really “aftermath/cleanup”. We usually start a story on this type of scene. It can be done if it’s treated like “part 2 of a story”.
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Is there a subplot that is weak? Downtime between your points can be a good place to tinker with them.
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“But I desperately need the space, but have nothing!”
Two options:
Hot springs chapter: animes do this all the time.
Basically it’s working on a chapter where you flesh out the personalities of characters that have been more responding to life than being themselves. This is where you find out team b’s hero has the most annoying hobby that he’s had no time for. Maybe this cool guy wasn’t so cool. The mild complainer of the group exposes themselves as a Karen. The silent one snaps and has a leveling breakthrough in combat that scares the absolute crap out the one who has been messing with them. Just down time that gives a new angle on who these people are.
Option two is working on foreshadowing. Cloverfield’s alien is shown, what, at a carnival? Anyway, what parts of the things you’re writing on needs to be set up before the event?
Hell, something might give you an idea…but without knowing details, there not much specific to say other than good luck.
Is omit an entire relationship from my life.
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What is wrong with me? Last night, instead of working on my stories, I started building an app with Google AppSheet. No clue what I’m doing, there’s a learning curve. The goal of the app would be to use it instead of my super cool sheet that’s made of waaaaaay too many formulas and functions. I thought it would be more manageable in an app, because that sheet is getting hard to maintain.
On the bright side, it looks like the app can be used on a phone. No clue what the process is for getting it onto my phone.
There’s a high likelihood that I’m wasting my time and the app won’t do for me what I envision as the ultimate story analysis tool.
Sigh. Before I got caught in that, I was watching and analyzing Constantine on Netflix. I didn’t finish it but so far I captured a lot already. I’m seeing a lot of tips regarding how to imply and hold back information. I think the trick to getting away with it is to make all scenes really cool so the audience sticks around to hear the withheld information later on.
And yet again I’m in awe of how on the dot every scene is timed. All scenes literally start at an even minute or minute:30 mark. How did they manage to get every scene to be complete/not feel choppy and still stick to a schedule that strict? Just imagine if you had to edit your book so that every chapter wordcount ended on a round number.
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You mean like this?
While the director has a great deal to do with it, it’s the editor that is meticulous, for that to happen.
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That’s probably a stellar editing job. It’s not like they shoot them that way 
My understanding is that there are specialists that do final movie cuts. I mean movies are made by giant crews.
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So, you can now set up NaNoWriMo2022. I set up mine in anticipation of November.
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Paranormal and murder mysteries lol
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I thought I put this link in. Lmao
But you’re doing something like this?
So, I had a brain wave…
I think you can almost string all the big writing events together like this.
February-March—write a novella for ONC which is basically an expanded 20K outline of a novel. You can spend a summer working on your own project to put into Watty of that year, while collecting feedback on the ONC novella and planning. In November—use NaNo for making your ONC into a novel with all the ideas/critique you’ve accumulated. Then, edit it and enter the Watty in August, after salting away another ONC project in Feb-March.
This way, you have 2 projects going each year. One from ONC prompt, one–your own.
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That maximizes the participation in awards and doesn’t saddle you with a useless novella on the profile (obviously, if your novella grabbed tons of reads, it doesn’t apply)
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Ooh, I totally support you. Can we be buddies on NaNo?
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