I saw Metric perform live at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto last night. It was a really fun show. The highlight for me was rocking out to the chorus of Empty.
Our seats were up on the third level but close to the stage. I like seats up on the side like that because it is one of the few places a very short concert-goer like me can actually see the band.
My cravings for a Pearl Jam concert have increased significantly.
The week of vacation I took to spend working on my novel is over. It’s back to my regular 50-60 hours a week at work.
I won’t lie, I had hoped to accomplish more during my week off. I wanted to have something more substantial to show for my efforts – like an outline or even the first draft of a chapter or two.
I still feel good about what I did accomplish. It was like a roller coaster at times because my progress tends to take one step back for every two steps forward, but I guess that’s better than the other way around! I’m happy that I kept working on the same story instead of giving up and starting over repeatedly. Even when I procrastinated, I managed to stay somewhat on topic by organizing my writing desk, grabbing some fantasy novels to read or researching agents and publishers.
I noticed that over the past week, the evening was one of my most productive times of day. I hope I can keep it up while working full-time.
So far I feel optimistic about that. I couldn’t stop puzzling out my story idea during my commute and I read articles on antagonists while eating lunch. I can’t get my story out of my head. I had such good ideas at several points throughout the day that I had to sprint from the car and dash out of the shower to jot them down.
Guess what? I did exactly what I said I was going to do and it worked. I didn’t start over, I kept building on my previous story decisions and now I have my premise!
Yesterday I reviewed the main story ideas I had so far; the ones with the most energy. I ignored any pieces that didn’t fit well or stressed me out. Then to ease into things, I listed questions surrounding that core group of ideas. I still felt hopeless at the beginning, I’ll be honest, but writing down those unanswered questions was easy because those were the things that were overwhelming me. After a page or two of questions, I couldn’t help but start to answer them.
My first ideas weren’t always the best, but I was surprised how quickly more ideas came to take their place. Those ideas felt really good and they naturally fit with multiple elements of my story including some bits and pieces I had discarded earlier. Instead of focusing on the fear I felt about inventing science fiction elements and deciding on my main character, I allowed myself to brainstorm within that framework. The results were awesome.
In the evening, a cool twist popped into my head, fueled by all the other story decisions I had made. I think I may have actually said “Aha!” out loud when it hit me. Playing with that idea led me to reconsider aspects of my setting and timeline which produced a very nice story hook. Suddenly I knew where my story started, I knew the crisis and who experienced it. Just like that, I had defined my premise.
I recognize there is a lot more work to do, but I feel confident that this premise is the right place to start. I am so glad I didn’t give up.
My writing decision making session yesterday was not as successful as I had hoped. I struggled. Why does that surprise me so much? This is the step I keep avoiding, of course it will be hard. I expected it to be easier somehow just because I am devoting more time to it.
I brainstormed on setting and a magic system filling roughly 20 notebook pages with ideas but as the day wore on I kept circling around the key decision I had to make – choosing the main character. As the flow of ideas petered out, I returned to the book “The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing” hoping for some advice to keep me going. It quickly became clear that I had to get that character figured out to move forward. How can I choose an appropriate crisis, if I don’t know who is experiencing it?
I want my protagonist to be Dakota St. Clair the space pilot because she’s cool, but I can’t figure out exactly who she is or how she fits into the world I have started. How does a 17 year old girl end up piloting a space ship? Shouldn’t she be in school? How could she ever afford a ship, let alone earn the respect to use it commercially or in any other fashion? Is she a magic user or a blank or something in between? I felt like I had accomplished nothing, and wondered if I was going in the wrong direction all together.
I started questioning all the decisions I had made up until this point. Should I include magic in a science fiction story at all? Shouldn’t I just remove the space ships and focus on the fantasy elements instead? Maybe it would work better if it wasn’t a young adult novel and Dakota could be older. Is she even the right protagonist? This sounds very familiar. I have to get out of this habit of reaching a challenging point and scrapping everything to start over.
Despite the fact that I did not come up with a premise and my efforts yesterday felt unsatisfying, it is unfair to call it a failure. I just haven’t succeeded yet. I think persistence is key here. I will sit down again today to keep going. I will hang onto the bits that are working and then keep building from there.
I watched the movie Cloud Atlas tonight with my son and some friends. It was 3 hours long and told 6 different stories at once. I spent the first half of the movie interested, but a little annoyed that I couldn’t keep all the stories and characters straight. By the second half, I recognized the story threads clearly but I was still confused about which characters were connected between stories and how. It didn’t help that the same actors cropped up in each story with wildly different makeup and occasionally even a different gender. Sometimes I found a connection between the characters played by the same actor and sometimes I didn’t.
At the end of the movie, I wasn’t entirely unsatisfied, but I wish I understood the connections between the stories better. I feel like I missed out on an “aha” moment somewhere along the way.
That said, I really liked a lot of the settings, and the stories themselves. I got the sense of an overall theme about stepping outside your culture’s boundaries to help another person which appealed to me. I ate up the futuristic Neo Seoul city and technology too.
It wasn’t until I came home and read about the plot online that I really understood what was happening. The following statement from the Cloud Atlas (novel) page on Wikipedia summed it up nicely for me. I guess it could be considered a bit of a spoiler, so I’ll give you some warning. Don’t read any further unless you want a brief explanation of the overall plot.
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“Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or observed) by the main character in the next.”
I also have to mention that after comparing the plot descriptions of both the novel and the movie, the nested structure of the novel makes a lot more sense to me. In the novel, the significance of the media passed between generations seems more clear and actually drives the narrative, creating the reasons for jumping between stories in the first place.
Laura Farwell 