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NaNoWriMo 7-26-2018: Camp NaNoWriMo update: What is it that I'm writing about? |
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K-Rave 2: The Crusade - This is the second visit to a dystopian near future where assisted suicide is legal and also entertainment. The K-Raves are an economic engine that supports workers on the lower levels and enriches corporate types on the higher levels. The system is built on good budgeting and great timing. A rich person liquidates all their worldly goods and then has assisted suicide during a big rave. The rave theme is picked by the Host. In the first novel I introduced a half dozen characters with a problem to be solved. The problem is caused by a paranormal event. During this Camp Nanowrimo my intention is to continue the story to the second novel in the series. That's what I wrote for my synopsis at Camp NaNoWriMo. I'm not going to tell y'all much more of the story than what I've shared online already. Mainly, it's in the near future, dystopian, with an under ground economy that is not based on cash or banks. Those things are in the background, like the economy of the K-Rave is in the background. Stories are character driven. People identify with the characters in stories. The adventures those characters go through give your reader experiences that they wouldn't have had in real life. "One just does not simply walk into Mordor."  You know that quote. You've seen the movie. It became an experience to you. Why? Because you identified with one of the characters. The story I am writing is character driven. What happens to them to make them feel unsafe? What do they do to make things right when things are going wrong? How do they protect themselves and each other? How do the powerless overcome obstacles with few resources. These are the challenges I'm setting before my characters and I can't sum up the story in a neat little package because I don't know where it's going. As a 'pantser' and not a 'plotter' I had no idea where the story was going to go. I often heard or read other writers say that their characters seem to have a mind of their own and they go off and have adventures that the writer didn't plan on and there was a sense of discovery with just free flowing. Other writers and writing teachers have said that more time is spent going over what is written without a plot, doing rewrites, adding foreshadowing later, and to them that's a pill if you are under the gun to keep on producing new fiction in order to support a family. I'm not supporting a family. I'm retired and all the time I have left in my life I want to spend enjoying myself and plotting an outline with each chapter broken down into action beats and then writing it out seems more like work to me than fun. Yesterday I broke the 50K word goal that I had set for myself. During this Camp NaNoWriMo I surprised myself with writing an average of 1,500 words a day. On some days I went over that by double and boy were my fingertips tingling. I use Scrivener software for writing my novels and each character is assigned a color for the section that their Point Of View (pov) is the voice. I ended up with 8 characters and only half had four sections. Others had 2 and then one only had 1 section, even though that character was seen through the eyes of others in many sections. So today I added digital index cards on my virtual corkboard and am adding "to do" place markers to add the neglected characters in so it's fair. It is easier to just show you.  |
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Another technique I use when editing is to compile what I've done so far
and turn it into a mobi file, upload it to my Kindle Fire, and listen to
it. Amazon does not make it easy to turn an ePub file (or any other file
format) into mobi. Be ready to Boss Your DOS if you want to do this
trick. But once learned you won't forget how to do it. The benefit of listening to your writing rather than running your eyeballs over the text is your ears will be less likely to lie to you. Your eyes lie to you all the time. Check the picture below from BrainHQ: Scrambled Text |
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 https://www.brainhq.com/brain-resources/brain-teasers/scrambled-text |
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Humans have only been reading text for about 5,000 years. That is not
long enough for us to have made any evolutionary changes to adapt to
text. But we've been listening to each other tell stories since we had
begun to talk. That's 1.75 million years of listening to each other's
bullshit. Almost 2 million years to be able to discern when someone is
telling us a tall tale. I can hear typos, dropped words, using "go" instead of "to" easier than I would be able to find those much needed edits just by reading the text that I wrote. When the sentence sounds wrong, it is wrong. If the dialog seems stilted and the characters are supposed to be friends then it's time to go back and tweak the dialog to a more informal tone. When I listen to my "daily draft" with my eyes closed and I hear a clunker I'll flick my finger to remind myself where that was. The next day I'll listen to yesterday's "daily draft" while I'm reading it on the monitor and I can find those clunkers faster than if I were just going over it with my eyeballs. Remember eyes lie. Especially when you're tired. When you've just written a couple of thousand words and haven't eaten a good meal or had a good sleep. Your eyes will make you think that paragraph was just fine, when it had clunkers in it. But you can be tired, laying down, eyes closed, listening to your daily draft and you will hear the clunks - thuds - and ooopsie daisies very clearly. Or at least I can. I'm going to end this NaNoWriMo ramble because it's time for me to get something to eat. Oh speaking of eats... the most fun I've had with writing this tale is coming up with names of restaurants, food stalls, retail establishments, and online apps. I have wasted many hours just clicking around the web to make sure I'm not stepping on anybody's toes using a name for a food truck and to find it's already been taken. Ok, now I'll end this ramble. |
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