The Place For My Writers Notes

Original posting Nov 8 2010

Yesterday was not a particularly productive day for me in terms of straight words for nanowrimo. On the other hand, since I was having trouble concentrating between my wife's volleyball game on television that she likes to insist I look at just for a moment, my continuing battle with my sinuses, and I suspect a bit of self pampering (darn it, it's Sunday, tomorrow I have to look at those student papers, why can't I relax a bit?) ... anyway, with all that going on, I took a step back and spent some time trying to lay out some other scenarios for the future writing. I was doing these in kind of rough bullet format, just a phrase or sentence or two describing what might happen. Also taking a look at the opposition, and considering just what kind of trouble it might raise. Admittedly, this is not direct narrative writing, looking over a character's shoulder at the scene, describing action, setting down dialogue, and all that.

However, I find that I need this kind of rough framework to be very effective at the other stuff. Somehow having a stack of pre-cut scenes in rough form like this lets me focus more on the scene that I'm actually writing right now. It also gives me more traction when I finish a scene -- I can just look at the bullet list and pick up another chunk to work on, instead of spending a while musing on what to do next. Not an outline, nowhere near that level of detail, but just some bullets about what might happen. Some are at the level of "The agents arrive in town" while others have a little more detail about what happens. But they are all just a couple of sentences, waiting for more attention later.

Still, I simply wrote them into the running text that I've been working on. And I counted those words on my nanowrimo total, because I really do think they are part of my writing process. Admittedly, they really need to disappear before the final editing -- each and every one of them needs to be expanded into at the very least one scene, and sometimes more. But getting the ideas started in this kind of bullet list of possibilities, in words, seems to me to be part of the writing. So I count it.

Aha! Over here on the aging nanowrimo notes http://community.livejournal.com/writercises/142578.html I talked about doing this kind of thing at the end of every writing session, putting down some notes about where you are and what you going to do next. Also, when you remember that you need to go back and straighten something out, add foreshadowing, or maybe work on some other pieces later on, make a note! I think one of the dangers of writing is trying to keep it all in our head. Except for short stories, and I'm not even sure about most of them, there's probably more there than we actually can keep in our head. And we have this wonderful trick -- write it down.

So that's today's advice for the nanowrimowers -- write it down. Don't depend on the little grey cells to hold onto that idea, question, point to consider, direction to explore, or whatever. Put it down in black and white, on paper, in a file, somewhere. And for the bonus, you can more easily look across that list for the purposes of rearrangement, selection, or whatever. Okay? Or if you happen to be pausing, put down some bullet points for later expansion. What might happen next? And after that? Wow, there's a chase scene somewhere ahead? Keep that in mind by putting it in the list. So...

WRITE!