A bit of a progress report.

This week, I’ve made progress. Reading-wise; I finished Martian Chronicles, and have picked up Pygmy (which I’ll hopefully be done with by the end of the weekend). Pygmy’s another Palahniuk novel, and while the narrative style is nothing at all like any of what I’m writing, there are sections of description (mostly chemistry and structural engineering) which I want to observe the style of.

            Speaking/listening-wise, I read and gave some edits on some sections of Kristin, Kacey, and Connor’s projects. I’m not sure my commentary’s been any kind of helpful, or whether any of my advice has made it into their final drafts, but being able to read, compare, and contrast the styles of the authors I’ve been reading and what my peers have produced has made for an interesting exercise, at the very least.

            Writing wise, the going has been slower over the last week. I’m drudging through the middle of the story, the bits which I’d always just handwaved away as “something happens before this next plot point”, and I’ve found that filling in that space with something that actually adds to the story in a concrete way is challenging, at the very least. I’ve got all the important bits done, or rather, all of what I’ve written has been “important bits”, and I suppose my current challenge is making the bits in between them also important/interesting. Squeezing bits of symbolism and plot in where I hadn’t initially planned for them, just because I think I need more material in between. I’ve been able to get work done at nights, and have been doing my reading and note work at school still. Writing at school has yielded almost no fruit whenever I’ve brought my laptop in. One of my saving graces, writer’s block wise has been the inclusion of the hexagrams in the plot. Whenever I’ve written enough and start to get tired, I just toss a few lines and see what they come up as, then let the story go in that direction. It makes sense that bibliomancy contributes well to storytelling.

            Habits of mind wise, it’s all been sitting in bed, background music (something with strings, or a good low end baseline, or both). At school I’ve been getting reading done and I’ve been taking notes constantly, so as to have plenty of “truth” to build off of. I’ve been stealing bits from my classmates, or from people watching, and fictionalizing them into character traits. It’s a lot of fun.

Log bits

This week, I’ve written up two possible openings, one involving Marcus’ childhood, and one involving his death. Still choosing which one of those I’m going to put first, and which one I’ll save for later. I’m spending a lot of my time just writing scenes that otherwise aren’t related to the story but transition into them well. This gives it a nice, layered storytelling feel, and allows for subtle insertion of meaning that the audience actually has to do some amount of close reading to find (connections which are otherwise loose or insubstantial). It lets me do a lot of showing rather than telling, because the stories simply being told in parallel makes for a metaphoric structure. I felt particularly inspired early this week, working a good deal of Monday and Tuesday nights on some of the less interesting bits, social interactions between major plot points, setting up paragraphs of description and foreshadowing. I’m definitely not writing this in order. I write as scenes come to me, and I’ll probably end up gluing them all together in the end to get some kind of cohesive manuscript. I’ve only been getting real substantial storywriting done in bed, at home. Whenever I try to work in school on actually writing the story, it comes out a little bit trite, kinda forced. I’ve taken to working more on the side parts of the project, necessary research, coding, storyboarding, et cetera et alius. I’ve got a few scenes written into a few of my notebooks, or just character details that i want to include. They’ve still worked as fonts of inspiration when I need them, but when it comes to writing more than a paragraph or so or actually getting story material down, I prefer to type it than to put it in the notebooks, still. That’s just a habits of mind nitpicky bit, but it’s been significant in how I’ve been making progress, or rather where and when I can. The goal for this next week is to get a really solid opening or climax down, enough that it could make a short story in and of itself, maybe 20-ish pages now.