As afore mentioned, I've been crushin' on this new story idea for two weeks now. I have a binder full of loose leaf papers filled with scribbles circled to separate ideas. Here are a few of them:
-an older Leonardo DiCaprio character. Hobbles. Pathological liar.
-soluble in water, in oil.
-Lady Elizabeth, chest shredded open, heart bleeding onto the cobblestones.
Characters, scenes, images, little scraps of character histories, details, random bits of potentially useful information. I love this part of writing. I love listening to different kinds of music and looking for inspiration to spark some sort of image or word to use in a story.
Well, it's been two weeks now and the time has come to stop day dreaming and get writing. This is the HARDEST part for me. The part where I feel most hopeless of ever becoming a writer. The task of taking all of these random bits and turning them into a full-fledged novel is daunting to say the least. What's the method? How does one bridge the gap between pure imagining and the finished work with all the elements? This is where the published writers out work the dreamers. Key word: WORK.
Laini Taylor (author of the Dreamdark series and Lips Touch: Three Times) describes the first draft as an exploratory one: (I hope it's okay Laini to post your words here instead of mine because they're so much better!):
Imagine you’re standing at the edge of a jungle in, let’s say, Borneo (because I have a fascination with Borneo). You have a rough idea of how big this jungle is -- you’ve flown over it in a helicopter and seen dense green treecover, and you know what’s on the other side. You know where you want to get to, and you have a very vague idea of what’s IN the jungle, but you have no map, and as of yet there is no trail. What you do have is a machete, a blank roll of paper, and a grease pencil.
There’s only one way to get to the other side of the jungle: take out your machete and start whacking. Carve your way forward and forward, sometimes sideways and sometimes back, until you get to the other side. That first time through, you’re going to come across ravines, swamps, viper nests, rivers, all sorts of things you didn’t expect and you’ll deal with them and get around them, over them, through them, in all manner of resourceful ways. And when you step out of the jungle on the far side, what you’ll have in your hand is a sprawling, wrinkled, sweat-stained mess of a map of the territory you’ve just discovered. It might not look very pretty, but it is a glorious thing, a document of discovery. You clutch it to you, and after you’ve rested and healed for a while, you go back to the far side of the jungle and. . . you start again. (Source here)
Isn't that awesome? I love all the bush wacking involved and really, isn't that how it feels a lot of the time? You day dream and mentally interact with your characters, you see things in real life that spawn a mini scene in your brain that makes your hands itch to write down.You have all this beauty and intrigue and pure potential rolling around in your brain so hard it makes you want to explode and then comes the painstaking process of adequately transcribing those feelings and mental images into WORDS. It's like trying to strain pudding.
It's not like this for everyone, you could be one of those people where words just fly out of your fingertips and you fill page after page without stopping. You're one of the lucky ones, my friend. Blessings.But if you're like me, it can be a hard process. But Laini's words bring a measure of comfort.These first few drafts are exploratory, getting to know the lay of the story land. Go easy on yourself. Give yourself permission to write horribly. Set an impossibly high word count as your goal and set a timer and write and write and write. It will come together. Slowly but surely.
You'll probably write a lot of what won't make it into the finished novel. But this helps two ways:
1. You have tons of great back story that helps you write a more dimensional, believable character
2. You're getting so much practice writing that subsequent drafts will be THAT. MUCH. BETTER.
And in the end, those who write, publish. It can be as simple as that. Keep writing my friends!
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