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.