Quote:
Originally Posted by mjhudston
how do people write their stories. do they use story boards, note books or anything else? I tend to make notes in my notebook when they come to me, but as I said nothing of late.
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All right, no one else seems to be nibbling at this one, so I'll bite:
Most of my stories begin as a single spark of an idea. Some of these prompts have come from
The Friday Challenge: "We Don't Plummet Out of the Sky Anymore," "Olive Drab" and "Armitridge, Olsen & Covey" all started from suggestions by Bruce Bethke and Henry Vogel, although I'd like to think I carried the ideas in directions they hadn't foreseen.
Others are scenarios that popped into my head while mowing the lawn, or washing dishes, or doing some other mundane task
when I wasn't giving any deliberate thought to my stories. When this happens, I make a quick note about the idea, but only give myself enough of a lead-in to remember why I thought it was interesting.
After the initial spur, I allow the ideas to bounce around in my head for a few days. A lot of good writing takes place before the pen ever touches paper, or fingers hit the keyboard. By "good writing" I
don't mean word-for-word transcription; I
do mean figuring out the bare-bones structure of my starting point and a desired resolution, and a few connecting ligaments to help me remember the overall shape of the beast.
Why don't I focus on specifics at this point? A bare-bones structure is essentially the way your brain stores the majority your own experiences. Unless you have an eidetic memory (or the experience was particularly vibrant), most of your recollection is based around connected snapshots, from which your awareness reconstructs events on a case-by-case basis. If you remember an event on a day when everything has gone right, and you are happy, you will probably gloss over any minor flaws you recall about the original experience. Try remembering the same event on a day when your wife yelled at you, your dog threw up in your slippers, and you are slightly hung-over, and every teeny-tiny little imperfection is liable to be magnified out of proportion.
Once you understand the bare-bones structure of your beast, pick a point from which to begin your description... and let it come out as you remember. Attempt to paint a clear enough portrait so that others will understand why the creature was worth capturing. Add tendons and tendrils and fingernails and nostrils and the hair poking out of the ears as you go, if you remember them as you work through the first draft, but don't be afraid to go back and add important details if you remember them later.
Every now and then, stop, and read everything that you have written, out loud. You will discover, if you didn't already know, that the human voice has a powerful cadence, and doing so may show you which words should be added, or reveal others that should be left out.
Does any of that help you? I hope so.
Now, I need to get back to writing.
- M.