NB: I’ll be reading an extract from the story I’m talking about in this blog post at The Midsummer Murder Mystery, this Sunday July 3rd at Cabaret Voltaire’s Speakeasy in Edinburgh. It begins at 8pm and is free entry. More information on the Facebook event page.
I spent the last three weeks behaving like a writer, more so than I ever have before.
After the kick up the bum that I needed from my tutor, I knuckled down and worked, worked, worked in the most functional way I’ve ever witnessed myself work.
At first, I had a character and a setting nestled at the back of my mind. Then I spent about four or five days researching around the subjects I thought were important to my germ of an idea, reading books and taking notes until ideas began to form. Slowly, I developed a list of five to ten scene ideas, pushing the story onwards.
I started to write, aiming for around 1000 words a day.
When I finished the first draft of each scene, I went back to the original scene summary idea and asked myself a few questions:
– How does this scene push the story forward?
– What does the reader discover through this scene?
– What questions are raised for the reader in this scene?
– Has this draft fulfilled the original aims from the summary?
Goodness, isn’t that functional?
As I continued writing, more scene ideas for further on in the piece emerged and I hurriedly wrote them down, until I had the bones of a plot and a first draft which eventually reached the colossal heights of 14000 words. Goodness knows what that is: it’s not a short story and it’s certainly not a novella, but never mind.
Because I didn’t plan its structure meticulously before I started writing (and I’ve never written a piece of this length before), there are a few loose ends which need tying up, and one or two of the characters need to be given a firmer functionality in the plot as a whole to merit their inclusion in the story at all. But these issues are to be expected and I think (hope) those issues are nothing which can’t be solved by adding some new scenes here and there.
All in all, I’ve learnt a lot from this, and I’m really pleased with what I’ve done. It’s the longest piece I’ve ever written, and even if it doesn’t work out I know that I could do it again in the future.
I’m meeting with my supervisor tomorrow to discuss the piece. I really, really hope that I feel as positive after the meeting as I do now. Fingers crossed.
This is going to be exciting, and I’ll be making a fool of myself alongside some pretty spectacular Edinburgh writers:
Rather Lovely 