Writing Report February 4, 2022

The new project is proceeding smoothly.  As I posted earlier, no two projects ever proceed exactly the same way, so let me use my current project and the previous one as examples of different approaches to writing.

The 2021 project takes place over the course of a summer; I literally break it down day-by-day.  Some chapters are short, just a couple of hundred words; others are longer, running up to two thousand or so.

When I sat down to start writing that project, I knew when certain incidents needed to happen because they were tied into specific dates on the calendar.  If I needed five things to happen in order to set up the events of July 4, for example, I could space them out over the preceding weeks.

This still left me plenty of room to evolve / adapt / improvise as new ideas and characters presented themselves.

The 2022 project also takes place over the course of a season, but doesn’t require the same rigorous day-by-day breakdown of events.  If the 2021 project was a calendar schedule that needed to be filled in, the 2022 project is more like drawing a human figure.

Start with a stick figure:
The basic bare bones idea of the plot.  At this stage of the proceedings I didn’t even have characters yet.  I knew the types of characters they needed to be, but not yet who they were.

That all happened over five years ago, a title jotted down, a few stray ideas added.  But by bit I added to them until in 2017 I finally sat down and wrote an outline with over 160 beats in it.

Not bad.

Call that the skeleton:
And as soon as I finished the outline, I stuck it away and forgot about it.

Sometimes that the best thing you can do with your writing.  Get something down while you’re full of fire and enthusiasm but they put it aside to bake on its own without constantly meddling with it.

I had a lot of ideas in that beat outline, some of them looking good at the time but once laid fallows for half a decade, revealed their weaknesses.

Case in point:
As a sub-plot wholly unrelated to the main story, I had an abusive husband / father learn to moderate his behavior and care more ab out his wife and children based on what he saw the protagonists doing.

He’s gone.

In the five years the idea lay fallow, I did a lot of reading about and by women and children on the receiving end of bad relationships.

Abusers don’t miraculously clean up their act because they see somebody else behaving better.

I know what my intent was with the sub-plot, to show how the protagonists did good by inspiration even when never aware of what it was exactly they were doing, but it just didn’t work.

It rang false and worse, it took attention away from the main story.

So I deep sixed it.

The earliest versions of my characters turned up in the outline, not by name but by the role they needed to play in the story.

Call them clay depth plugs:
The same way a forensic artist uses small clay plugs to determine the depth of the skin and muscles while reconstructing a skeleton, in this case these character archetypes give me the general range of the final story, letting me know what needs to be filled in.

Right now I’m adding muscles and sinews:
The general frame is sound, now I’m adding the scenes and characterizations that actually make it work.

This story is moving at a good pace, but I can tell it’s going to need a lot more before it’s shown to anyone.

Once I get the muscles laid in, the next step is the skin.

Skin is texture and color:
It’s what enables us to recognize reconstructed skulls in forensic cases; for this story, it’s going to be the stage where I go back and add more distinctive layers of individual personality to the characters.  There probably won’t be any significant changes at this stage, but I might make minor ones that will have to be rendered consistently through the whole story.

Finally, hair and clothes:
The last little bits, less about the appearance of the characters, more about smoothing the prose to make it as effortless a read as possible (not every story can or should be effortless, but this one needs that flow).

The last stages probably won’t come until after I finish the first draft of my second 2022 project, which will be good as it will enable me to let that one lay fallow until I’m ready to rework it.

Will I do the second 2022 project in the same manner as this one?

Who knows?

My stories tend to write themselves.  It’s less that I’m creating them and more than I’m uncovering them, and no two are ever found in the same place or by the same means.

But this is the way this one is unfolding, and so far (knock on wood) it seems to be working.

© Buzz Dixon