Thursday, January 19, 2012

The idea that just won't leave you alone...

About a year and a half ago, when I was knee deep in still writing the first draft of the last version of my current WIP (was that confusing enough for you?), I woke up with this vision of a girl in my head. I only knew one thing about her, and nothing else.

Over the course of the past eighteen months I've successfully ignored her for other writings and chose to keep ignoring her even though she wouldn't quite leave me alone. I kept telling her to go away and to stop bothering me. She had no story. What was I supposed to even do with her? I continued to push her away until finally, last night, I decided I'd write down what I did know about her. That one tiny thing and see if anything else came to light.

It did. She presented a whole host of new facts about herself and within an hour I figured out exactly (okay, maybe not exactly) who she is and what story she wants to tell. It was amazing and exciting and I'm so very excited to get started writing all about her. And to make it even better, I'm heading out for a writing retreat in less than a month and the fact that I actually have something new to work on--and it's something I'm excited about--is making me super duper giddy.

And you know, I'm not even annoyed at myself for making her wait this long to get to know her story, because now just feels like the right time. Did I mention I'm excited?

2 comments:

  1. Cool, Cindy! I hate having characters without a story. I'm just not cut out to be a pantser, I guess. I need to know my characters and to set them in a story, and at least have some idea of things that will happen to them in the course of the story.

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  2. I sometimes wish I were more a of a plotter, Colin, but it just never seems to work for me. I'm sure it creates more for me to fix later, but for now, it's just the way my brain works when putting a story to paper.

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