It makes me really happy to look at this:
Look at all those chapters! It’s like a real book-type thing! (Secret: Chapter 6 currently consists of the word “Six” and the sentence “I was at the police station forty minutes later.” It feels so good to open up that next file when I’ve finished a chapter, I can’t help myself.)
😀
I don’t like my third chapter. It’s too long. By several pages. It’s top heavy. The first four pages are kind of a mess. And it was supposed to be zany and funny, but I don’t know if it is or it’s just lame and trying too hard. I don’t know, maybe it’s funny. Dan says I can’t go fix it, I have to come back to it later because I have no perspective. He’s right, but still.
Just getting it out of my system. On to chapter 4.
One real chapter and two mushballs slowly taking shape. I’ll git ’em. One page at a time.
I’m having a problem introducing characters. On one hand, I can’t introduce backstory on 10-15 characters in the first chapter, because then no action will happen. On the other, I’m finding myself writing badly when a new character enters, like:
Our cousin Bob came through the doorway. Oh crap, you don’t know who Bob is, you don’t care about him. Uh. Uh. Bob was an elephant hunter. Bob was 42 and a Lysol addict. Bob was tall. Once he bumped his head on a door. Yada Yada WAY TOO MUCH BACKSTORY ABOUT BOB.
Bob finished coming through the doorway. God that took forever.
Bob sat down next to me, tall-ly. “Got any Lysol?” SEE SEE I HAD TO TELL YOU THAT, NOW YOU GET IT.
So, yeah, that’s not very good reading. I think the answer is to drop a clue as to their existence before their entrance, then dial back the exposition and fill it in as actual action happens. And substitute backstory with action, too.
I don’t actually know what I’m doing, folks, I’ve never written a story longer than 6,000 words, and now I’m going for over ten times that. You’re watching me fake my way through it. Whee.
August 8: 11 pages
This last week has been extremely difficult, and I got nothing done until today. Frustrating. But here it is, my first benchmark. And the end of the 1st chapter. I’ll take it. Next up: to 16 pages by August 20th (I’m on vacation the whole time.)
Mi abuela raised three daughters all by herself, with no help
I think about her struggle and I find the strength in myself
These words, melt in my mouth
They hot, like the jail cell in the South…
This morning, I woke up
Feeling brand new, I jumped up
Feeling my highs, and my lows
In my soul, and my goals…
“Get By,” Talib Kweli
It’s going to be a good week. Wrote 2 more pages in very relaxed fashion yesterday. Am totally obsessed with the above song. Now have more than 2 weeks to write 5 more pages. CAKE! May just knock it off in the next few days. I’d love to get so massively ahead of my schedule that I have to redo the whole thing. Happy Monday.