Sunday Morning: Breathe Deep

Morning Musings

Pardon My Dust

Palms by Kat

Sunset? Sunrise? A new dawn of a new day.

Sledgehammer to the Process…darn it!

Have joined the Book and Writers Community over @ compuserve. Thus far it seems pretty cool.

Though I have not yet made the jump into the Writer’s Workshop that it’s connected to.

The BIAM challenge went down the tubes with the arrival of a stack of papers that needed to be graded. Nothing like grading papers to halt all creative thought . Students are great…but their work is focused on non-fiction. (Maybe someday I’ll get to teach a fiction workshop style class ::fingers crossed::)

Anyhow, ScriptFrenzy is still going on. But that too seems to have been shelved.

All that being said, Jenny over at the compuserv group has set up the Muse Exercise for April. But since I dove in there at the end of March, I figured I might give the March exercise a go.

Right now…the thing that scares me the most is the Unknown…and that’s a big one as I try to figure out what to do with my life and career and this odd vibe of wanderlust that’s been bugging the crap out of me lately (I’m feeling a lot like Vianne from Chocolat when she starts to hear the winds blowing and calling).

So much for Exercise 2. How ’bout 1?

Borrowing the sentence from Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary:

Looking down, both my friend and I saw the ominous form of a small homemade bomb.

Staring down at the device, I felt this cold chill start at the base of my neck and spread throughout my body. First, the cold crept up to my scalp and set every strand of hair on edge with the tingling…not a good tingling mind you. That was quickly followed by the chill scrolling down my spine and out to my finger tips. Those fingers…they’d been warm earlier. Now? Now they just felt like skin colored icicles. And I couldn’t feel them. Finally, the cold shivered down past the base of my spine to my legs…and those weren’t very helpful as I just stood and stared at the small box that contained the possibility of our end.

And I swear…the first thing, the first thought that scampered across the blank screen that was my brain on bomb was “Nice shoes.” Y’know what? That was it. The very absurdity of that thought was just enough to make me move my still frozen legs towards her…sitting there, her wrists and ankles duct taped together…with that damn box sitting on her lap.

And that’s when I heard the voice behind me shout, “Stop!!!”

So there you go…

Flip through a book you haven’t read yet. Find a single sentence and write it down. Then go off on your own tangent for 10 minutes. See where you go…

Writing Challenges and Figuring Out the Scene Cards

Thinking that it would drop kick me back into noveling action, I thought that I would step into the Book in a Month challenge set forward by Victoria Lynn Schmidt.

So off I went and joined the Yahoo e-group connected to the book (VBIAMClub), which seems to have garnered quite a number of members. While the current challenge is running from 15 March to 15 April, there appear to be any number of different challenges going on simultaneously. Or at least a couple seem to be couple different challenges going on…or starting.

Anyhow, I joined and set up my goals…or rather goal–continue/finish the novel I’d started during Nanowrimo this past November. I’d finished the 50K words. But I soooo wasn’t done with the novel. So I got down to brass tacks and read through chunks of the book to figure out what it was that I was supposed to be doing according to the book, which is great I suppose. After all, there are lots of things that I know my Nano novel was missing…including some more in-depth character development and such. (I’ve been wandering confused…back and forth re: character sketches).

Work, as usual, got in the way. But I figured that I’d catch up over the weekend. I wrote up the Log Line as well as the back cover description. I got the basics of the outline figured out. I even got the Story Idea Map going for Chapter 1 as a way of getting back into the story. And then I ran into the challenge…scene cards.

Schmidt mentions that there ought to be 10 core scene cards. One for the beginning…one for the end. The rest of the scene cards fill out the middle ground between the middle and the end. Some of them are related to the various plot points embedded within the three acts.

But that’s where my confusion begins. Where she advises that there not be that many actual scene shifts, I’m trying to figure out whether or not those scenes are changes in locations or more overarching re: a particular story point that starts in one location and ends up in another.

The folks over at Scriptfrenzy (an idea I’m toying around with) have set up a scene worksheet that has a series of questions that might be helpful in developing the ins and outs of those scenes…once I figure out what is and isn’t considered a scene .

So I scanned that, and it looks very helpful. But it still leaves me with questions about what is considered a scene. Still confused, I found this article “Writing a Screenplay with a Full Deck.” In this article, there’s a discussion about how the storyline is divided up into about 40 different scene cards…some of which appear to deal with the Hero’s Journey (Joseph Campbell rears his head ).

Defining a scene would help…

The purpose of a scene helps achieve coherence in a short story or novel. The fiction writer should have a goal to accomplish with each scene. A scene lets the reader know that the setting has changed too. Common purposes of a scene include:

• Advance story – The scene must move the story forward. This could mean introducing a problem or making a problem worse for the characters.
• Show conflict – The conflict could be between two characters, a character and nature, a character and time, and so on.
• Introduce character – The reader needs to meet each character at some point. A careful writer does not introduce too many characters in one scene. This could confuse the reader.
• Develop character – Along with introducing a character, a writer can use a scene to show the character’s good and bad points.
• Create suspense – Suspense keeps the reader’s interest going, perhaps more than any other element of fiction
• Give information – The writer can weave information into a scene so the reader knows the needed background of the story.
• Create atmosphere – Using conventions such as setting, weather, and time, the writer can create a certain mood in a scene.
• Develop theme – A piece of fiction should have a theme. Each scene should bring out the theme to the reader.

Scenes that are memorable, the ones the reader remembers, will attempt to achieve as many of the previously mentioned purposes as possible. If the scene has no purpose — or even has a purpose, but not a sufficient one to justify the space it takes up — the writer should cut that scene out of the story.

Sometimes the scene is followed by a sequel…or aftermath…the fallout of what happened in the last scene:

The Sequel has the three parts Reaction, Dilemma, and Decision. Again, each of these is critical to a successful Sequel. Remove any of them and the Sequel fails to work. Let me add one important point here. The purpose of a Sequel is to follow after a Scene. A Scene ends on a Disaster, and you can’t immediately follow that up with a new Scene, which begins with a Goal. Why? Because when you’ve just been slugged with a serious setback, you can’t just rush out and try something new. You’ve got to recover. That’s basic psychology.

And that led me into the whole thing about writing the “perfect” scene:

As we said, the Scene has the three parts Goal, Conflict, and Disaster. Each of these is supremely important. I am going to define each of these pieces and then explain why each is critical to the structure of the Scene. I assume that you have selected one character to be your Point Of View character. In what follows, I’ll refer to this character as your POV character. Your goal is to convincingly show your POV character experiencing the scene. You must do this so powerfully that your reader experiences the scene as if she were the POV character.

Also found this: How to Avoid Chasing Paper As A Writer

So now I’m off to work out this part of the puzzle…hopefully, I can get that figured out.

Conflict…Drama…Dilemmas…Oh My…

Conflict is the essence of drama. Got none? Then you got none. It’s the primary ingredient that weaves together all the other elements of a novel.

::sigh::

At present, I’ve got a problem. Even though the main character’s got a big external dilemma, her internals are a bit on the slim side.

What’s even more frustrating, I’ve got a cast of people…but most of them are desperately in need of more depth than I’ve already given them. My “love interest” character is one of them. For a romantic character, he’s very odd…a shy guy with his head in the job (a cop). Seriously…he had to be reminded to kiss my protagonist.

Really need to work this out.

The big external dilemma/puzzle is set up. The antagonist has done his job.

Now I need to figure out some of the character arc…

Character Arc—the rocky path of personal growth and development a character undergoes in a story, usually unwillingly, during which the character wrestles with and eventually overcomes some or all of a serious emotional fear, limitation, block or wound.

In a character’s development he or she might overcome:

o lack of courage or inner doubts
o lack of ethics
o learning to love
o guilt
o trauma from the past
o errors in thinking, etc.

Weaknesses, imperfections, quirks and vices make a character more real & appealing.

o They humanize a character. The audience can identify with them.
o Flaws and imperfections give a character somewhere to go and progress toward in the story.
o The development of a character is only interesting if they overcome something.

Zen Writing and Feeling Lost in the Exploration…

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.–E.L. Doctorow

I have to say, those are the exact right words that explain the space I’m in right now. I’m in the exploration. There are lots of different ways that this book can go, and each decision heads it in a completely different direction.

In some ways it reminds me of this thing a friend and I used to do back in college. We’d get in the car with our sodas and a couple bags of chips or whatever. We’d make sure that the tank was full. And we’d just head out and zen drive our way through the afternoon.

Sure…we had a map. But the point wasn’t to know exactly where we were going. It was to experience the drive…to see the world…and to find new and unusual things that we were certain none of our peers would see of the state we’d made our adoptive home for the time being.

During one of those drives, I drove along what had once been a ridge runner’s road…those old roads that lead from the still to wherever and would be driven, at great risk, by folks wantin’ to run the moonshine out ahead of the tax folks.

That road had been paved…sorta…and ended at the end of the ridge road with someone’s house. He was a pretty nice guy and pointed us in the direction of yet another cool sight–a bar carved into the side of the mountain.

Anyhow, zen driving allowed us to let go of everything that was bothering us–school, guys, hangovers, jobs, what have you–and gave us the space to just be and enjoy the road…the air…the scenery and explore parts of ourselves as well as the state in which we lived. We did this with a sense of adventure…a sense of wonder…and a feeling of walking driving Zazen…of attaining enlightenment.

At present, I feel as though I’ve lost that sense and am too wrapped up in the details. Even as I get more written, it feels like there’s something big missing within the writing…maybe within me. A hole where there’d once been that feeling I’d get when I was zen driving. I keep looking for the map. I keep trying to develop the map–an outline of what I want to happen…when, where, and why.

And as I do more and more of that, I feel like I’m losing something else for the sake of better story control.

Maybe it’s time to put the map down and just drive…