In most of the stories I write, I'll know the basic direction I'm going, but I work out the details as I go. Serendipity plays a nice role because I'll often see the right detail or overhear the perfect comment that will fill in the puzzle just when I need it; maybe I've trained myself to be open to the creative or maybe I'm lucky at that moment. Generally, I'll make notes in longhand in a spiral notebook I keep by my bed. Sometimes I have a strong desire to work on a particular piece, I'll feel some of the pieces falling together, all I have to do is work out a few of the specifics, and I'll make a generous amount of notes, asking myself questions at night and sleep on it, waking the next day to have one or two epiphanies about how to solve something. It's a very cool process and it's one of the things I love about writing. Usually.
And then there are nights like last night, where Carl's sick and not sleeping well, so of course, I'm not sleeping well, and the rain is upsetting the dog, and all I end up doing is tossing and turning and having feverish half-dreams about stories, and one story visits the other and the characters are all confused and annoyed and things happen that make absolutely no sense whatsoever and there's a mutiny and before I know it, I'm arguing with them and they're arguing back and I'm kinda sure they institutionalize people for this.
That's about the time I wake up and have an epiphany, all right, but it's usually for the story I hadn't planned on really working on right now, and damn it, it's a pretty good one, so now I know if I don't go off to work on that one, it's going to keep haunting me and annoying me and interrupting the characters in the other story and it's going to turn into a mess.
Of course, the way this works is I will go work on the one for which I now have the epiphany, then hit a point where I'm excited about it and need to figure out more details, and I'll write the stuff in the notebook all set to brainstorm and dream out the answers that night and it'll be a free-for-all again. These two stories in particular have been doing this for a while. I'm close to bitch-slapping me some characters. Or myself, I'm not sure which.
Posted by toni at February 6, 2004 01:51 AM