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hippybngstockngAnyone who's been reading me since the beginning knows that every so often I attempt or think about attempting Nanowrimo, and end up tanking... There's been lots of hurdles that kept me from even getting a solid beginning not to even think about finishing, but this year many of those things have been way reduced and I plan to make a solid attempt. I even wanted to further guarantee that I might actually write something this year by planning some of it in advance, and specifically setting it up for myself to be as easy to stick with as possible. No science. No characters with complex careers that I am not familiar with. No implausible plot twists that could throw me into a "what if the audience won't believe this" spiral of thinky that derails the entire process.
Under that set of rules I felt constricted until I started talking to Crash about what writer's tools I was also thinking of using to keep it moving along for myself- Writing about something I know, using things from my own life, using things I am thinking a lot about already... It hit me during the conversation that I did have a possible set of questions to focus on that would remain interesting and is fairly easy to hack out. It wouild be a great deal of fun trying to take a look at the whole worldly debate about the meaning of marriage, through fiction... It'd be relatively simple to create about 20 different characters that interact with each other in some way or another, make lots of coupling happen in there, some getting married, some getting divorced, some specifically staying single, etc... Bottomless pit of possibilities. Worst case scenario is it reads like a bad soap opera.
But then the thing about writing stories like that that does usually hang me up caught me right away: Whenever you write a story based on regular ol' folks and their lives, there's always the chance that you're going to borrow too much from your real life, have some friend of yours think they spot themselves portrayed in an unflattering manner or something, and then end up alienating everyone you know because of your supposedly evil tell-all book about all your friends. I NEVER want to write that book, trust me.
But at the same time, borrowing from your life and the lives of folks around you is intensely useful to writers and always has been, so it occurred to me that because of the wonders of LJ polling, I can actually ASK my friends how they feel about ending up in some of my writing, since some of you might actually be intensely flattered to be immortalized in such a manner. I could even ask you to give me better details on some things to beef up my story, which would of course help me IMMENSELY.
So I bring you the DO YOU WANT YOUR 15 MINUTES OF FAME TO HAPPEN IN SOMEONE'S LAME NANO-WRIMO poll!
(NEW- COMMENTS are now SCREENED for anyone who would like to tell me a story I can use!)
[Poll #1053770]
Under that set of rules I felt constricted until I started talking to Crash about what writer's tools I was also thinking of using to keep it moving along for myself- Writing about something I know, using things from my own life, using things I am thinking a lot about already... It hit me during the conversation that I did have a possible set of questions to focus on that would remain interesting and is fairly easy to hack out. It wouild be a great deal of fun trying to take a look at the whole worldly debate about the meaning of marriage, through fiction... It'd be relatively simple to create about 20 different characters that interact with each other in some way or another, make lots of coupling happen in there, some getting married, some getting divorced, some specifically staying single, etc... Bottomless pit of possibilities. Worst case scenario is it reads like a bad soap opera.
But then the thing about writing stories like that that does usually hang me up caught me right away: Whenever you write a story based on regular ol' folks and their lives, there's always the chance that you're going to borrow too much from your real life, have some friend of yours think they spot themselves portrayed in an unflattering manner or something, and then end up alienating everyone you know because of your supposedly evil tell-all book about all your friends. I NEVER want to write that book, trust me.
But at the same time, borrowing from your life and the lives of folks around you is intensely useful to writers and always has been, so it occurred to me that because of the wonders of LJ polling, I can actually ASK my friends how they feel about ending up in some of my writing, since some of you might actually be intensely flattered to be immortalized in such a manner. I could even ask you to give me better details on some things to beef up my story, which would of course help me IMMENSELY.
So I bring you the DO YOU WANT YOUR 15 MINUTES OF FAME TO HAPPEN IN SOMEONE'S LAME NANO-WRIMO poll!
(NEW- COMMENTS are now SCREENED for anyone who would like to tell me a story I can use!)
[Poll #1053770]
