This week was okay. Just generally middling. Did a good amount of work but didn’t do as much as I had originally wanted to. So much bullshit is happening right now in the world, especially because we’re looking at Nov 6 around the corner. It all feels even more dire and overwhelming and heartbreaking than usual. Putting my head down and getting creative work done is harder than usual. I know this isn’t a unique problem to me — we’re all working through this together. I had dinner with one of my sisters-in-law (she is a painter) on Friday, and we commiserated (over alcohol and delicious seafood).
Three of the flash fiction pieces I worked on this week don’t hold together as well as I’d like. The endings are a bit rushed and the arc isn’t clearly defined. Sometimes I know where I’m starting and know where I’m ending, but then I get lost along the way. I wind up on a convoluted path that doesn’t quite get to point B but maybe gets proximate to it. I think I need to do more explicit planning, really plot out the arc before I get started. Or, at least not get lazy when it comes to figuring out what comes next — just take a beat and think more about it instead of rambling along and hoping that I get there eventually.
On a previous season of Writing Excuses (I think maybe season 10), Brandon Sanderson mentioned that one of the plotting technique he uses is working backwards from the payoff moment. He figures out his big reveal/climax, and then asks what happens right before that, and then before that, and so forth until he gets to where he’s going to start. I’m going to try that this next week. Maybe between planning forwards and planning backwards, I’ll figure out the middle.
NaNoWriMo is coming up pretty soon. That’s the other thing I’ve started thinking about. Instead of starting a brand new project, I’m going to add 50k words to That Fairytale Thing that I’ve been working on. So for this upcoming week, I’m going to start in on an outline.
What are y’all working on this week? Anyone doing NaNoWriMo?
