Drawing from the Well
Queries: 58 (+0)
Rejections: 49 (+1)
Second Eighth
Chapter 15/89
Scene 96/502 – 19.2%
Word Count: 25,545 (+12,155) – 19.1%
Yeah, it’s been a while and a lot of writing. I was off from work last week and pounded out a huge number of words. Granted, I’ve fallen back the last few days but that’s life. It feels good to be close to the next turn in the story. It’s going to be an exciting scene. In the meantime, I keep chewing away at the words. Here are the numbers currently:
And yeah, that’s a 4500-word day this weekend. It felt awesome!
Filling the Well
The Handmaid’s Tale: 100%! (Book 32/25 for #ProjectBookworm2019)
Blue Lily, Lily Blue: 100%! (Book 33/25 for #ProjectBookworm2019)
The Bible: 85%
The Plastic Magician: 24%
The Raven King: 22%
Reading has been GOOD recently. I finished two books and they were both good. The Raven King is getting good; you can feel everything coming to a head. As for The Plastic Magician, WOW have I missed Charlie N. Holmberg’s writing. It’s efficient, quippy, and oh so interesting. I tend to struggle putting it down. That’s how it was with the original trilogy and the follow up fourth book is just the same, possibly more so since this is a new protagonist.
Polishing the Well
So much has happened the last twenty-two days that I can’t cover it all. I just spent a week on vacation. I got some things done around the house as well as some writing (as I covered above). I felt mostly refreshed…until I got back to work. Now I’m paying for the week off. I’m close to done repaying the time and am about ready to get back to regular work. Here’s hoping I can pull it together soon.
Well Chat
Circling Back to Setup
That’s an old picture for an old topic. I try to pull fresh pictures for each blog but it felt appropriate to go back to a good picture for many reasons. As I was drafting this week, I had to revert not just back to planning but essentially to world building. I realized as I introduced new characters that I didn’t know them well enough. And then something interesting happened.
So let’s back up a bit. I look at world building as scaffolding while the building is the book. I could go further strangling this metaphor but let’s focus on how this affected me this week. I spent months setting up LOTS of scaffolding. Scenes, plot, locations, and characters. That’s what got me this week: my character scaffolding wasn’t strong enough. I knew how I would use them but I didn’t know what they looked like or what they were about.
That was when I circled back. I stopped drafting temporarily to go down the rabbit hole with three new characters. Something interesting happened then. Historically, I wrote an anecdote for POV characters. It helped me get to know them. I did that this time for the first of the three characters. In writing it, I figured out what the whole point was: damage.
Everyone has damage. If you have lived, interacted with people, and had experiences of any kind, you’ve had some bad experiences. No matter how hard our parents try to prevent them, bad things happen. Those bad things hurt us, cause damage. When that damage is sufficient, it defines us as people (at least in part).
By writing that anecdote, I realized that the REAL point was to identify the damage. So now, once I figure out what the damage IS, I can let that inform the character and what they’re about. Ironically, character damage makes stronger scaffolding.
This means that no matter where you are in the writing or creating process, it is worth you time to back up and plant better seeds. It saves time as you move forward because you create a better first draft. So focus on your scaffolding and don’t let progress stop you. When you see something wrong that requires you to fix it, FIX IT! You’ll be happy for it later.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG