So much to catch up on. Emails from folks saying things like, "I know you told you would be gone but what ever possessed you to actually go through with it. Now do my project! While you were gone I decided it was due while you were gone."
Bleh!
So I am going to deal with that stuff, and probably do a summary tomorrow. I had a great time, caught up on my sleep (hmmm, how did that happen?) and actually wrote three pages at midnight Saturday which I think will turn out to be the beginning of my next novel. Whatever that is.
4 comments:
How does that work for you? Do the actual phrases ever make it all the way to the projected book, or is it more that you have a feeling the idea or sense of the thing to come is somewhere in these three pages?
Do you ever pick up a couple of pages later on down the road and have NO IDEA what you saved them for?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Heh. Well, I have written plenty that utterly baffled me a week or a month later.
In this case, I've had a number of plot ideas percolating over the last few months, stuff I've made notes on or simply left in the mental rumination heap. Nothing that made me want to sit down to write, because they were plot-focused. I don't generally start with plot -- I usually start with a mush of character and voice.
What happened on Saturday night is simply that I had a sudden vision of a scene. The scene isn't directly connected to any of the plot notions I've been kicking around. Instead, it was a way to express a character's voice and a small piece of his worldview, essentially a framing device for the novel.
The plot of the novel remains amorphous, but I feel very intrigued by this scene fragment, particularly because of the way in which I found a sense of who my character was and how he would respond to situations which develop out of the plot ideas I'm considering.
Will it end up in the finished novel? Possibly. Almost certainly not exactly as I wrote it. Based upon how I got things rolling with Lost Dog and with novel number 2 (now down to a final draft!), I would imagine that 50% to 80% of what I wrote Saturday night could survive to a final manuscript. As a framing device, it immediately suggested other scene fragments through which I can expand character, and it forms the foundation of theme.
Of course, it's not like it came out of nowhere. I've been thinking about my next novel a lot as the current one gets closer to done, and a lot of notes are floating around to that end. In a way, I could argue that starting my next novel has been stalled not by a lack of plot ideas, or characters who I want in the story, but by a lack of an understanding of the overlying theme that would tie it all together, and a means of expressing that theme and illuminating the characters. On Saturday night, I think that's what I figured out.
Good on ya re. the writing, though I'm getting the vibe that you're just saying you're still gonna be MIA in blogland.
Well, I probably won't just fall right into the next one as soon as this one is done. I'm actually hoping for a little more blog time once I deliver the final for book two later this month. And I am working on my LCC post now too, which will go up some time today. Maybe later, but definitely today!
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