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It's that time of the week again, time for the kick in the pants. The idea is that having somewhere to report progress will spur you on to make some. So I'm posing the question to all of us here. Did you write this week? As we have been reminded in the past, writing for the purposes of this thread can mean just about anything you want. You did some editing? Report it here. Outlining, pre-writing or any other kind of prep work? Sure, that counts too. And, of course, writing new work always counts.
I wrote the outline for my NaNoWriMo project this week and it's now sitting and waiting for me to come back and review it, and make any necessary tweaks. I'll probably do that in a few days or so.
In addition, after a long talk with a CP, I'm pondering a complete rewrite of my Necromancer trilogy. It's going to be a fairly big change though, requiring me to plan and write the story more or less from scratch, though the world I built is not changing. The male and female MCs are changing a fair bit, thus the need for the story to change a lot. It'll be better for it, or so I keep telling myself.
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I wrote about 6,000 words on my novel this week. Up to 70K with another 20K to go. Now I have four books in my WIP (two completely drafted) and I'm going to have to go into heavy rewrite mode to get these all out.
Posts: 1608 | Registered: Feb 2009
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I had a pretty good week, every day except Thursday, and a couple of days managing a couple of sessions to double my daily output. I worked through a crisis point in the plot (with more to come), and have a good idea of where to go next. (Whether it's any good, I can't say.)
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I've done probably 10-15K words on my MG project over the last two weeks. The idea was to attempt an old-school juvenile sci-fi story which trades mostly on adventure in exotic settings.
I tried several openings with different narrative styles. First was an omniscient third person narrator who tells the story from outside the protagonist's viewpoint and who offers the reader very definite opinions of his own -- very old-fashioned, but not unheard of in recent juvenile fiction. I also tried a first person retrospective narration -- again which allows a lot of narrator opinion.
The third style was a more contemporary third person limited narrator who restricts himself to what's going through the focus character's consciousness. It's not entirely hot narration; the narrator abridges some events and mentions background that shapes the character's reactions. The biggest difference is that the narrator never offers any opinions of his own.
In the first 13 exercise, people strongly favored the contemporary narration style, so I knocked out two complete chapters (6100 words total) in that voice. It had some interesting consequences. With an opinionated narrator (first or third person) I can simply tell you in so many words that "Veskilos is a horrible planet and Digby's lucky to get off of it." But in a limited narrator style I can't do that, because in the moment Digby doesn't really understand how terrible the place he lives is. I have to show you Digby dealing with things that he takes in stride but which shock you. At one point Digby gets slapped around by a cop, which isn't quite the wholesome family friendly tone I had envisioned.
Digby comes across as a lot tougher than I'd imagined him, matching wits with the cops and engaging in Machiavellian power struggles with rivals in his gang. That grittiness is a consequences of choosing the non-opinionated narrative style.
The tone of the opening is a lot different than I'd imagined it would be, and I'm wondering how I will mesh it with the rest of the book. On the other hand, opening this way has provided me thematic keys to the rest of the story. Digby the tough street kid lives by a code which shares certain universal values with the spacefaring fraternity he will join someday.
It'll be interesting to see if I can pull it off. MG writing is hard, which is why I'm trying my hand at it, having completed three adult novels thus far.
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