Story Stuff

I use Grammarly's plagiarism checker because I want to be told how crappy my writing actually is!

I don’t like doing things like plotting/outlining my stories. For some strange reason, I don’t count that as “productive” writing and don’t count it for my day’s K, so I don’t want to spend the time doing it.

Because I’m a scratch and restart wannabe writer, when I switched from a first-person POV to a third-person in that last day’s K, it didn’t bother me. I’m restarting the story anyway. This is going for the new draft. Cough, cough, not really. It’s helping me get the story straight, though, and it counts.

The next day, Monday, between working and going to night class, I didn’t make time for writing. I can’t work on Tuesdays because of the way my class runs, and my class was cancelled, so I had all day to do something productive. I didn’t feel like working on that 12-page paper that’s due February 4th that I haven’t even started on, so I did a Story Stuff for my WiP. Yes, I really do call it that. A Story Stuff is exactly what it sounds like: title, characters, and plot all in one Word doc or in a notebook if I feel like writing it by hand.

After I got down my title, I started with listing my characters: my protagonists, my antagonists, and my supporting cast. I went further to divide them up into the good side, and the evil side, and giving a description of everybody, just to get them straight. It’s as anal-retentive as it sounds. Then I went back to the top again with my protags and antags, and put their wants. I put something like a trope for them down. After that, I added which character would most likely oppose whom under the respective name.

Okay, now time to go to the plot. But the plot is already there, with all of the character information. This little point taught, or perhaps reminded me, of some writing tidbits I had forgotten.

1 – Stories are about people and how they relate to each other. No duh, Sherlock. It’s so obvious it’s fascinating.

2 – Before I entered the ivory towers of academia that is college, every time I got writer’s block, I would go back and re-read writing rules. There was this one-page article that I loved. It had three blocks in it for a beginning, middle, and end. I’d do a Story Stuff with it, and then continue on or restart. It got me writing, and that’s what mattered. Somewhere along the line, I’d forgotten that this method works.

3 – It doesn’t matter that all the writing articles all say the same thing, or one author says one thing, and another author says the complete opposite. Read it anyway. Keep it in mind. Always. Good guidelines at 13 are still that at 21. You don’t stop re-reading your favorite book just because you’ve memorized it, do you? Of course not.

I was on the fence about continuing on, but I did a synopsis for good measure. It’s important to write that stuff down. Most importantly, afterwards, I got my day’s K, with a better vision of what I was doing than what I had previously.

May the words rise up to meet you. And me. God and the four patron saints of writing help us all.