Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Nano - down to the wire

Well, unless I get serious over here about and crank out a few thousand words, I might just not meet my self imposed, unofficial Nano goals. Which would mean that I'd owe a certain writing friend some free art. Better get cracking!

I did have a good day yesterday though. Oh, I only eked out a couple hundred words, but I'd been sitting over here stuck at the beginning of chapter three for several days. I kept thinking that the scene I was about to write was ho hum, unnecessary, a snooze, but I felt I needed it. Then last night it hit me. The problem wasn't that the scene was no good. It was that it wasn't a scene at all! What I was actually writing was a SEQUEL.

If you don't know what a sequel is, sequels basically
  • follow scenes
  • allow the character to react to what just happened, then plan a new goal


Chapter two ended on a scene, and instinctively I'd followed up with sequel, but I wasn't recognizing it as such. I still haven't internalized this craft part of scene-sequel-scene-sequel yet. But once I did, everything fell into place. I was able to plot it out, and now hopefully I'll find some time today to flesh out the sequel and move on to the next scene, in which I introduce a subplot and sleazy badguy. :D

k.

No comments:

Post a Comment