Day 7 Lament

I am soon going to be officially 3643 words behind schedule.

This is bad. Very bad. Not quite OMG-disaster-incoming-FLEE-bad, but don't-you-think-you-should-start-to-panic-and-defeat-procrastination-inertia bad...

The good news is that I have all the support tools in place. I invested US$20 in buying two very good e-books on creating character and creating plot. The first has armed me with ten charts of excellent questions for which to confront a character with, and thereby derive some character out of. More questions than I could shake a stick at. And I -have- been asking questions. Some based on the charts, some based on my own question-generation capability. Every time I ask them, a bit more stuff shakes loose and gets a smidgen clearer in an iterative process.

Being an awful decision maker, with a very open mind when it comes to storymaking, whenever I don't have a strong leaning towards something and am okay with going either way about, I use the old Mythic trick. Ask a yes/no question, roll a dice and get it decided by the gods of fate.

The Plot book is sitting ready for me, with 20+ tools to shake loose plot scenes - some for when the Muse is cooperating, and some for when the Muse needs to be gently nudged and some for just torturing material out of the Muse.

Celtx is also just as ready, and wondering when I'd be brave enough to actually go back to it. It's such an easy program, and I really have no excuse for not writing...except that I don't have any CONTENT for my plot.

Which is another key concept that this plot book taught me. A lot of plot books blather on about plot structure - beginning, middle, end and the works. Right. I know all that. I know what scenes should be like, two people conflicted with each other so that there's a lot of tension and back-and-forth in the scene.

I'm just actually missing CONTENT. The crunchy detail bits that come from the author and make it not just another boy-meet-girl story.

I have 20+ plot tools in my hand for generating content. Most of which are all tricksy little variants of getting one's butt in the chair, freewriting and asking questions in some form or another, and listing ideas down in brainstorm mode in one form or another. Once they're on the page, so to speak, one can then organize them in some semblance of first draft story and from this outline, start writing.

It all makes sense. It's like the GTD process that works for practically anything. First you COLLECT everything. Ie. brainstorm and coredump away. Then you PROCESS them one at a time, and ORGANIZE it into some form of structure. Then you can take ACTION/DO stuff and afterward REVIEW (aka revise.)

I have been huddling away from actually doing the first collection step because my mind goes blank the moment I try.

My excuse has been that I need to get a better idea of the characters who are going to be involved, and a better idea of the world and background and setting so that I have a place to put them into.

Thing is, thanks to the attack of the character book, I'm gradually running out of excuse room on the first.

Today, I can proudly state that I made some major decisions on the -other- characters taking part in the story (Thank you Mythic for helping me decide) and I have a vague clue as to who they are. I even formed yet another possible ending based on the dice roll that threw a as-yet-unexplored character into the role of the MC's sidekick/partner, and I like this development.

Now the MC has some tension/conflict in her nice little perfect world of "I am the best lone wolf out there and nothing gets the better of me." It's now become "Jeez, how the hell did I get saddled with this lame duck. You're slowing me down, and being a ton of trouble, and worse of all, I'm not allowed to kill you like I'd really like to, cos that would ruin the good guy-best sheriff in the land image I'm cultivating."

Which has a lot more potential and conflict already instead of "Superwoman chases down pathetic criminal runaway."

Tonight, hopefully I can make some more decisions on the said pathetic criminal runaways part so that they become less cardboard props and seen from the MC's arrogant perspective, and become slightly-more-real people with needs and wants of their own.

Again, I am clinging to the hope and potential just generated this afternoon. I started them off making them even worse than the MC, but that just created really one-dimensional money-grubbing arrogant retard nobles off chasing for treasure in the over-the-top sadistic Halanil vein. Which...didn't feel quite right.

So there was this idea sledgehammered me earlier. What if I make them the putative heroes? Since I'm doing an anti-hero protagonist doomed to fall (though from her perspective she's being a perfectly human selfish prick), her antagonist really ought to be more typical hero-type singing nice psalms about love, friendship, FREEDOM!, self-sacrifice and all that jazz.

Unfortunately for them in this harsh new "elemental" world I'm building, such thoughts never seem to work out too well. The writing on the wall yields "Dead heroes and live cowards" as my motto.

This all feels just-about-right. I already did the romantic-superhero-cotton-candy-meets-sci-fi-dystopia world for Nanowrimo, where it's nobility and larger-than-life heroism that prevails amidst lots of evil faceless background organizations...

So now for something completely different. Heroes die, and the weaker side of humanity tends to prevail. Fits.

All this is all very well, but I'm still not that much closer to rounding them out 3D wise, so that's something I must get done before collapsing to bed today.

Hopefully, once that is done, I will feel confident in taking these four characters and facing them off, and then coredumping possible scenes in a nice big brainstormy list.

I'm really not looking forward to the coredump, cos there's a big blank hole in my brain where images of scenes are supposed to go. My Muse and my subconscious have been wriggling away from this for a week.

Meanwhile, I fall behind 667 words a day.

*screams* *freaks out* *flails arms miserably*

I cling to some optimistic hope and faith that I will eventually generate a working outline that I can bumrush through, typing like a madman - with my 4 days break starting Fri-Mon.

Which means I actually need my working outline by Thursday. Tomorrow. Day 7. A working day with a full-loaded schedule that exhausted me on Tues, and a one-hour show at night that is not to be missed. Somehow, the brainstormy coredump needs to be squeezed in during all the spare minutes.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Aieeeeeeeeeee! Nooooooooooooooo!

Thus ends my lament.

P.S. The bright side of forums procrastination is that I found a new band. Alright, a really old one that I just didn't know anything about. Jethro Tull. Confession: I'm not sure I really like the music. But their lyrics. Wow. Image-filled. Some guy wanted to write stuff based on "Thick as a Brick." Took one look at the song and it knocked me over flat. Filled with idea stirrers. Now I have another place to go to for ideas when that Bureau in Schnectady runs out.