electric mist

brainstorming

So. Book 2. It's begun, and I'm pretty jazzed about it. I'm balancing between writing some stuff and still working out some details on the plot twists. This weekend, I had one of those epiphanies that you live for as a writer, a woohoo moment of ooooooh, and if I do that, then it makes all this other stuff mean this other thing and... hey, you. Wake up over there. This is the interesting part! Of writing! Well, maybe not to you.

Sorry about that.

I love the brainstorming part of writing, when a story is new and growing. Sometimes there are discoveries that are giant leaps forward and sometimes, there are little teeny nuances a writer discovers that deepen the meaning of everything around it. I love playing, "what if?" and then seeing where that trail leads.

My way of writing is a sort of mishmash. I tend to write reams of notes, thinking out the characters and what they want, what they need, why, what bothers them, upsets them, makes them happy... what the obstacles I'm about to place in front of them mean, what's at stake for them if they fail, etc. And I also tend to simultaneously start incorporating some of those what ifs, how they'll affect the character, what direction with they take the story, and so on. At some point, the structure of the story gels and I can start writing; I'll have a pretty good idea of where I'm going and the major turning points and twists and obstacles, but I'm also free(ish) to incorporate new discoveries along the way. Sometimes I'll have set something up without realizing it, and then suddenly, I'll have an epiphany about the way that set up could pay off, and I'll usually be floored at how well the set up worked... when I hadn't even planned it that way consciously. Overall, though, I have to have the general structure of the story and know (reasonably well) how it ends to know where I'm going with it. I chalk this up to a tradition of oral storytelling in my family -- it's a bit of a performance art, really, and you have to know where you're going so you know how to bring your audience along with you. (If that makes sense.)

So, I'd worked on book 2 quite a bit prior to getting the edits from my editor, and am back working on it, having a lot of fun, although this part of the writing process is the one where my family wants to say, "Yeah, sure you're writing while you're staring out the window eating chocolate." Hey, it is not my fault that staring and chocolate are required for brainstorming. It says so. You know, in the writer's manual. Which I had around here somewhere. It was on page 82, I think. And I'd be happy to show you... as soon as I put my hands on it... I think someone borrowed it. But I'm telling the truth. Would I lie to you?

Posted by toni at May 8, 2006 06:55 AM