Monday, October 31, 2011

Week 1 - Terrible Failure

Arrgh! It's like everyone I know is against me actually sitting down to write. So I'm 9000 words behind my goal. This in and of itself isn't too horrible, since the idea of 2000 words a day is supposed to be an attainable goal. One of the reasons I'm so frustrated right now, is because I know I can write 2000 words a day. Not doing so is creating a cognitive dissonance to my self-efficacy of writing a word count each day.

Now there are several things I can do at this point. I can justify that other people took me away from writing, or I can say that I was too busy with other things, and that I'll just have to work harder. But none of these things will allow me to accomplish my goals. Instead I have to explore a way to set up time and talk to my loved ones about my goals. Support and open communication are the keys to setting myself up to succeed after failing.

So while we have established that the story is about a paradigm shift that will occur from a brother knowing more about his sister's life, and experiencing a different life, the actual reasons that he dislikes his sister is because she has strengths that he does not (and vice versa). As a matter of fact, his sister is a representation of his shadow (Jungian Shadow). To explore this, part of the shift is to take part of what his sister does differently that he is weak at, and strengthen it. By the end of the story, he will not hate that aspect of his sister, and will understand it better because of how his paradigm has changed.

How exactly this is to occur is still being worked out and is probably on the level of a Freaky Friday or Parent Trap type scenario.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Breaking apart a Novel

My starting point, a story concept that I previously came up with, is from one of my random, quick write it down, locations. I have 4 choices that I think would be appropriate. I labeled them each 1-4 and rolled a d4. The roll of 2 means that I will writing the following:

Brother and sister switch bodies, and learn to get along better. A Modern (present day), Humor, Slice of life, Sex story. The main problem facing the protagonist will be: The brother needs to find a way back to his body before his reputation is ruined and continue living the life of the sister, which has several complications such as friends, boyfriends, homework, and using the bathroom. Possible settings of the story would be: High school, downtown, house party, home.

The protagonist would be the brother. The antagonist would possibly be the sister, as she tries to ruin his life, as she imagines he is ruining hers. She could do things like fail tests that he is taking (he would be good at school), get him cornered by her boyfriend, and make him become ostracized for being gay in high school.

The other thing is that I have less than 30 days to write all of this. Which means that I'm aiming to finish in 25 days. That means, 2000 words each day of writing. No ifs, ands or buts. The goal is to reach 50,000 words. Regardless of whether the story has typos or inaccuracies. The only thing I have to do is give it a beginning, a middle and an end by the 50,000+ word mark.

I'll be giving myself 1 day to research and prepare, 1 day to put the project together, and 1 day to relax or as a buffer.

Ciro (short for Cirocco, ancient Egyptian wind) and Cerise (French for cherry) are the brother and sister. The sister has a boyfriend named Jacob (supplanter). The Mom and Dad will mostly be out of it to keep characters down. Ciro will be a loner, while Cerise will have a friend, in this case Jamie (also supplanter) who will want the brother.

Small Basic Hollywood Style Guide:
Opening Scene - The theme of the story
Setting Up the Story
Inciting Incident
Big Decision
Into the Wide Unknown
Getting to Know the Character
Midpoint - At this point the story has reached the midpoint, but that does not mean I'll be at 25,000 words.
Antagonist Returns
Low Point
Ah ha! Moment
Final Push

If I still need more:
Character Reactions to Plot and/or subplots
Relationship Black Moment
Character Revises Life Goals
Possible Re-emergence of conflict or opposition

Monday, October 24, 2011

One Long Month

It has been one very hectic and busy month. Between work and my school assignments, I was kept busier than a busy bee. I was getting 4 hours of sleep per day. I was to the point of not functioning. Needless to say none of my side projects got done.

An interesting thing is happening for my current class, something that I felt like taking advantage of anyways. It just so happens that my next class's final is a 20% project. This is the concept from Google, where each employee was encouraged to take 20% of their time to come up with new products or ideas for the company. As part of my final grade I need to create something that is measurable, shows where I am at in the beginning, and shows how far I got at the end.

Though the class started today, it will also end in 4 weeks, which is essentially 1 month. This following month is November. November is also known as National Novel Writing Month. I've never written a 50,000 word story. I've done half of that though. So that means that this month, my goal is to write a novel. I'm starting at 0 words in the novel. Blank slate. The one thing I'm going to do is dip into my archive of story ideas, and choose one.

So while I'm doing other assignments and working, I'll be writing a novel. The other good thing, is that this means that I'm going to be using not only this blog as a measuring device, but as a way of exploring the concepts that I'm learning as I apply them to my project.

So this will be a month all about writing! You might even get pictures or a vlog post!