my mumblings

remember this post? remember these two ladies? jessica corra and bria quinlan? good, because it’s time for another round.

today’s topic: growing your story.

in keeping with the theme from last month, i happen to be at the beginning of this stage as well. i finished my disaster draft on november 10 and then i didn’t look at it again until december 1, three weeks later. i was attempting to get some space from the story and the characters before i dove in to do the revisions.

oh, but first, a little tidbit about me. i am an under writer. no, not this kind but rather, someone who (on the first draft) writes less rather than more. my first draft clocked in at 44K and a typical YA novel runs anywhere from 60K-80K words, so you can see i have a lot of growing to do.

the things i’ve done to grow (other than drink lots of milk and eat vegetables) are character interviews, chapter mapping and world building. also, taking notes and making suggestions and fixing dialogue and printing out my story and handwriting revisions and moving scenes around and deleting portions and adding phrases and puffing up passages and phew!

growing is hard.

but audiences are perceptive and precocious and practically perfect and so i don’t want to disappoint any of them even if, at this juncture, they’re only imaginary.

so, onward and forward and backward and sideways and every which way the story demands because i want smooth transitions and moments that make you weep and uncontainable giggles and characters so real, you have to pat the couch to make sure they’re not sitting next to you.

make sure to check out bria’s and jessica’s posts to see what types of growing they’re doing.

Tags: friends, writing

This entry was posted on December 7, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.