The Raven's Mutterings Wherein Carl Cravens talks about geeky stuff

3Nov/09

NaNoWriMo: A rough start

So I did get started, and my first half-hour actually went pretty well. Wrote 637 words, and at that rate, I'm looking at less than 40 hours to write my entire novel. An hour and twenty minutes a day? Barring getting stuck, that's pretty doable.

But I didn't get more than a half-hour… I was so wiped out yesterday that I never got back to writing. Don't know what it was, but I seem to be pretty much over that. Except this morning, I woke up with a pulled muscle under my right shoulder-blade. Hurt like [amazingly bad words I don't allow myself to write here]. (Apparently I used improper lifting posture while carrying 50-pounds bags of duck feed.) I couldn't find a position that didn't hurt, and typing was really out of the question.

I called in sick… I'm a computer programmer, and that requires typing all day long. That sucks, and then it sucks for NaNoWriMo… already "in the hole" for not hitting 1667 words on the first, and I didn't do any more writing after that. Missed my first write-in, too.

So, day three, and I begin by owing 4364 words for the day. This is exactly the kind of start I need to encourage me to call a misdeal and throw in the towel. But I can push through this… my daily word goal only jumps to 1763, an extra 100 words a day. I can do that.

Tagged as: , No Comments
1Nov/09

NaNoWriMo: Well, I suppose I should get started.

Full night's sleep (strangely very tired, though), church is over, lunch is coming up, and my son really, really wants to play Toon. And I'm contemplating getting started on my novel.

It's the first day, the day I should really be rarin' to go. And, of course, I'm intimidated by the idea of just getting started. That intimidation is why I'm doing NaNoWriMo, though.

Knowing my usual inclination, if I follow my gut, I'll put off starting any writing until after Nathan goes to bed at 9:30, then I'll struggle to get started, write about 500 words, and wonder what insanity made me commit to this and tell other people about it.

So, I have to develop a strategy around that. Lunch, then just thirty minutes of writing. No word-count goal, just thirty minutes and then I'm free to do something else, like play Toon for a couple of hours. Then another thirty minutes of writing before dinner. I know a lot of people jump in with guns blazing, but I'm going to have to ease in a bit.

Despite not forcing myself to reach a specific word-count for the first couple tentative toe-dips in the noveling water, I do want to hit the 1667 words for the day. I really want to stay ahead of the word-count, because if I start to let that slip, saying I can make it up later, it's just going to make things harder down the line.

Tagged as: , No Comments
31Oct/09

Have roleplaying games crippled my storytelling?

I've been preparing to start a 50,000 word novel for NaNoWriMo, and I've been struggling with finding a plot. I have a notebook full of story "starts" but very few where I know how I want the story to both start and end.

When I started looking for a plot idea that would lend itself to 150 pages and just 30 days for a rough draft, I wanted something simple, but every idea I looked at, I couldn't come up with an ending. Just recently I realized that I was looking for endings without knowing what the central conflict of the story was supposed to be. I was, quite literally, trying to solve the "problem" of the story before I'd determined what that problem was.

And I find myself wondering… has years of playing roleplaying games, both in the player's and gamemaster's seats, crippled my ability to tell a story on my own? As a player, I've learned to create "starters"… ideas for characters and starting situations, without any strong pre-conceived notion of how the story should progress, let alone end. As a gamemaster, I've learned to set up situations and antagonists, and often have some idea of how things might end, but I've learned to be vague and unattached to any particular story path or outcome.

In short, I've learned to quite deliberately not tell the story on my own. I've learned to create story elements, but then refrain from turning those elements into a story until I sit down to engage with four other people who will bring their own elements, and then together the flesh out the story through our roleplaying interaction.

That's a weird thought that, when I've read so many books on writing fiction and screenplays in an attempt to improve my roleplaying, my roleplaying experience would get in the way of trying to write fiction.

Tagged as: , , , No Comments
 « Newer Entries  Older Entries »

Pages

Recent Posts

Categories

Feeds

Archives