The journey of writing 300 pages begins with a single summary.

I just wrote a summary of chapter one of White Noise by Don Delillo. It's a very brief 2 page chapter so i'm off to an easy start. My 'goal' which really is better stated as my 'quiet desperate hope,' is that I will summarise a chapter, then either on that same night or on the next night i'll do some writing based on some of the techniques discovered in my summary, before moving onto the next chapter. It's past midnight and i'm feeling pretty tired so I hope in a quiet desperate way to do some writing tomorrow night after work and then move onto chapter 2. 

I love it when a plan comes together.

I think it's been about ten days since i've written anything, either on here or on ficly.com. As much as I enjoy posting short stories on ficly's website I can't let go of the nagging idea that I really want to settle on some sort of plan for what my novel is going to be about.

So far none of the goals i've set on here have really worked for me in a way that's satisfying. I have no desire to keep reading Voglers book on The Writers Journey. I don't discount what he says in his book, I think it's full of interesting ideas and was surprisingly much more intelligent than I thought it would be, I just don't feel like it's for me. Not presently anyway.

Also I love writing stuff on ficly, but the minute I turned it into a goal-driven exercise for myself was the minute I lost enthusiasm to keep at it everyday.

Maybe it's impatience, or maybe it's instinct, whichever it is, I can't stop thinking that the only thing that's important for me at the moment is to develop an idea for a story that I actually want to write. So with this in mind i'm going to start on yet another way of approaching this thing.

My plan is to use my favourite novel as a model for a way of developing my own story. My favourite work of fiction is White Noise by Don Delillo. I certainly don't want to write a plagiarised carbon-copy of Mr Delillo's book, but rather i'm going to spend some time using his structure to develop a story for myself. The way he introduces his characters and themes, i'm hoping to extract the essence of his book to use it as a series of building blocks to create my own original work.

Let's see if that gets me anywhere.

Not quite King for a day, fool for a lifetime.

I got out of my funk and added five more short stories to ficly.com today. I say stories but really they're scenes. It's roughly the equivalent of writing 1000 words. I read Stephen King's On Writing a couple of years ago and remember him saying that his recipe for being a good writer is to read for about 6 hours a day and then write 2000 words.  I am not at that point, but it does sound like a good goal to eventually try to live up to.

Adding scenes to ficly.com feels like great practice for eventually tackling larger chunks of writing. I'm going to try and write 5 stories a day on there for the next week.

I'm still not sure what I want my first book to be about. I have a lot of conflicting images, story ideas & characters in my head. The old saying goes that every one has at least one book inside of them, for me it's more like I have about 20 or 30 paragraphs inside of me that don't really have anything to do with each other.

Not to worry though, it's still early days. Right?

Hardly noteworthy

It's been over a week since i've written anything. I've just been staring at my computer for the last hour, trying to find a way to get back into it. I want to add some more stories to Ficly.com but nothings working so far. Blerg!

Whinge and Purge

I haven't managed to get any writing done for a few days. I miss it. I keep thinking of things to write about on Ficly.com. Problem is life gets in the way sometimes.

I've had an as yet not properly identified sharp pain on the left side of my head for a few days. The doctor put me on antibiotics and I keep taking tablets to stop the pain but so far it hasn't improved. I highly doubt it's anything serious, but it is seriously annoying.

I've also been working more than usual the last few days, and because i've been on afternoon shifts I tend to sleep in of the mornings and then i'm too tired to write by the time I get home.

I did have an amazing dream the other night that I want to use as the basis for a story. I dreamt that there was a good wise Dragon that gave birth to a nest of eggs and at the same time there was a dark evil dragon that gave birth to four eggs. The eggs of the evil dragon hatched and before it could be stopped, the first-born of the evil dragon killed it's three siblings straight away. Instinctively evil.

Hopefully this tuesday i'll have most of the day to spend on writing.

Who likes short shorts? I like short shorts.

I've set myself a goal of writing 100 short stories on;

http://ficly.com/

I need the practice doing some writing and this is the perfect way to try a lot of different things in a short time.

No matter what writing advice you read they always invariably say 'Read, read and read some more.' I haven't done much reading the last few days. I'll have to rectify that. A bit of Game Of Thrones & a bit of Submarine.

I even have a column in Ebony magazine called 'Musings'

Rightly or wrongly i've been speed reading my way through Book Two of Vogler's Journey. At the end of each chapter he has a series of six or so questions to help you break down and think about the elements he is discussing. I haven't started writing answers for any of these yet. I know I should, but i'm stuck in this no man's land at the moment still trying to form a broad picture in my mind of what my book will be about. I think i'll have to pull my finger out and just started writing some answers. Maybe i'll post some or all of them on here.

I've been playing around some more on ficly.com. Such a fun interactive way to get some small writing done. Also i'm trying to write a short story (max. 750 words) for a writer's digest competition. See link below.

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/promptly/your-story-prompts/your-story-3

What the hell do I want to write about? Seriously, tell me.

That is so wizard!

I've got all of today to write, and think about writing, and do some more reading about writing, and i'm glad for it.

Here's a breakdown of what i've achieved so far;

Firstly I set myself a ten minute limit to write down as many books as I could think of that have made an impression on me over the years. I'm less sure with each day that the whole Emily, the Faeries and the Gnomes story is really what I want to do. I wrote a list of books I like to help me form a better picture of what the hell it is I want to write about.

I read another chapter of Voglers book. This one expanded on the idea of the ordinary world and the placement of the hero within it. A lot of good stuff in this, I won't go into it now, i'll just wait for it to come out in the process of finding and planning my story.

I then started looking for some more stories on ficly.com to add onto but couldn't find anything that really jumped out. So I distracted myself by looking at another one of the writers resources i've mentioned in previous posts. It's a profile sheet for creating characters. Very useful stuff, I think this could be a great prompt for building a story from scratch by starting with characters that really appeal to you independent of any story line.

http://www.creative-writing-now.com/writing-character-profiles.html

I started tooling around creating a Wizard character for myself when it occurred to me to go back to ficly.com and start my own story thread based on this character. On ficly.com they have a challenge prompt if you're interested wherein they set a theme or an idea for you to base the start of your story on. I chose a romance prompt, which is not like me really, but I thought it suited my Wizard.

This is the story thread I started on the site;

Dr. Wz. Agrimon Crocumn would be his full title.

He had become a doctor first, as had been his families expectation, but once his studies had finished and he had found placement in a small village as a herbal practitioner, his first love for all things magic had returned to his thoughts, and try as he might he could not shake it’s grasp.

He knew his ambitions would be met with vague family disapproval, but for Dr. Crocumn it wasn’t a great stretch to go from being a local. H.P. to also being a Wizard. There was a great cross-over in knowledge of herbal remedies and ‘magic’ was really just as likely to cure as many ailments as ‘medicine’ despite the stigma attached.

The villages youngest witch, a Miss Primrose Wort, had certainly expressed much encouragement when Dr. Crocumn had told her of his plan. “That sounds delightful Croaky”, she had said, and she’d sounded like she really meant it too.

Dr. Crocumn had other dreams he wanted to tell Miss primrose of, dreams of him and her, but he struggled to do so.

I think for the rest of the day i'm just going to repeat the different activities i've done so far.