My Journey To The Wattys 2020

Day 221

The weekend has come around again, and it's time to take a peek back at the last few days and see where I'm at with this crazy project of mine.

The last few days actually haven't been filled with a lot of writing at all on this project. I spent some time writing up character information, which actually was very useful and shaped the narrative for each character somewhat.

Yet, at the same time, I found myself at an odd crossroads of sorts. As a pantser, what I'm doing right now doesn't quite feel organic and it kind of made me doubt my decision to go down this more organized path. Should I bother following steps or just go back to what I've done in the past? 

Instead of writing I ended up settling down with Stephen King's "On Writing" audiobook. I spent a few hours here and there throughout the week listening to the master himself describe his writing journey and how he writes. It's been enlightening and listening to his journey made me think about how I went about writing my last two stories, The Descent and Intervention.

The Descent began life as a short story here on Wattpad, a contest entry for the @sciencefiction profile. From there, it grew into a project that eventually became a 120,000-word sci-fi adventure spanning the galaxy. What's unique about this story is that it's totally a pantser story. 

After rewriting the initial short story as a four-chapter story, I jotted down some rough ideas on where I wanted the story to go and just started writing. For the most part, I let the characters take me on a ride roughly in the direction I wanted to go. Most of the story was literally made up as I wrote it and at times, the story changed direction based on feedback from my readers. It was an interesting journey, both to see where the story would end up, as well as to write it. 

Intervention also started as a short story but I proceeded differently. I knew after writing Intervention that it would become a longer story and I decided early on that I wanted to explore the story more in-depth before writing it. So, I wrote what I'd call an exploratory outline. In a way, it was a high-level synopsis that covered the story from beginning to end. Then, when Nanowrimo 2018 came around, I just wrote based on that outline. In the end, the story came out pretty well, I think, and it's a story that has at least one or two sequels in the future. 

Both of these stories came about differently, but in the end, they were both written as a pantser and I'm pretty happy with the end result. The Descent is in the Paid Stories program, both stories have over 40,000 reads and overall readers seem to like them.  

The one thing I like about Stephen King is that he likes what I'll call situational writing. Take your characters, put them in a situation and then see what happens, keeping their interactions honest and real. In a way, The Descent developed this way almost exclusively. I kind of knew where I wanted the story to end but in the end, I ended up somewhere slightly different.

This is also kind of where I'm finding myself today with this project. After doing a brain dump this past week of the story I want to write, although it had a beginning, a middle and an end, it felt limited, like I was painting myself into a corner. It didn't feel right.

So, last night, I kind of went back to the summary and thought about how my characters would handle the situation. Over the next few days I'm going to take a step back and put my characters in the initial situation of the story and see where that takes me. Just last night, laying in bed, my mind took off in all kinds of promising directions so it'll be a matter of capturing those.

Another unexpected wrinkle in all of this is that yesterday, as I was pondering King's methods, a whole new story just came to me, literally from beginning to end. It's a story that I created a title and story a few weeks ago and now, I just didn't have the story. Now I do.

This second story is very much a YA story. YA stories are a bit outside of my comfort zone at the moment but at the same time, I think it's a powerful story about loss and finding your place when you're unwelcome in the world. It's a story I want to write because I think it'll be good.

Obviously, this is a bit of a dilemma. I have two stories, I have covers and titles for both. I could start writing either today, although my sci-fi adventure is the one that's a bit more rough around the edges.

What to do, what to do? That's what I'll be contemplating the next few day as I go back to my original story to see if I can make the story fit more of what I envision.

What would YOU do?