Storytelling

The plan was to blog weekly and already I've veered away from the plan. There is a good reason for it. I’ve been busy. Finishing the draft for FireWalker. Yay!

I made the deadline, with a couple of days to spare, being prepared for the meeting tomorrow with my mentor. For a day or two in there, I thought I wasn’t going to make it. Going away for the long weekend made it dodgy. I surprised myself and wrote while away. Only had one day off last week and that was due to the 6 hour drive on the back of a lack of sleep the night prior.

My tally for the first week for the RWA NaNoWriMo was about the 16,000 mark. I knew it would be high and this week balances that with only about 9,000ish. There are still days left so we’ll see. The tally I set includes playing with a novella. I’ve yet to decide which one I want to play with. So many ideas, only so many hours in a day.

I was very fortunate to be one of the guinea pigs for the now very popular and successful Year of the Edit series of workshops run by the Qld Writer’s Centre. We had the very talented Kim Wilkins as our tutor. I’m pulling on my notes from that year to work on the scene map and commencing the structural edit for this book. I know a lot of people would say it needs to be ‘frozen’/placed in the drawer etc for a bit but I’ve discovered I’m an odd duck. Well, I already knew that but as I discussed the story with my partner, (who also write) he was amused to see how I really do not have any memory of writing some of my scenes. Even ones with my favourite characters are forgotten about. It means as I edit I am reading my story with a ‘first time’ overview. To edit a story detached and methodical are two words that are heard over and over and well, over again.

It leads credence to my theory I am first and foremost a storyteller. If I had lived a few hundred years ago, I would have been quite happy being a travelling bard, telling the stories, slightly different each time. Possibly, I may have had to be male as well, but that is another post for another time. Now in this day and age, stories, to a degree, need to become a static document, captured in time for repeated reading pleasure. It will be interesting to see how detached I will be as in the past my modus operandi was to abandon the baby aka story altogether. It was told, out of my head why would I want to look back at it?