Ideas

Hi everyone,

I found two more pages that needed micro-tension added to them (2/10). I’ve nothing else to report. I watched some author interviews, too, which I always love to do. And since I don’t have much to report today, I thought I’d answer some similar questions to the authors in the interviews I watched.

What is your favourite part of writing?

Fast drafting is my favourite. This, for me, is where anything can happen. I’m not locked into a story or events. I can let my creativity flow and come up with whatever I want, no matter how bizarre. What I’m writing doesn’t have to link with what came before (I can link it in revision), or with what comes next because I haven’t written it yet.

Do I like reading?

I love reading. Once I start a book it’s hard for me to control myself and put it down. I pretty much read any genre. If It’s a good book, I’ll read it. Some writers don’t like to read while they are writing because they don’t want to be influenced by the book. This doesn’t bother me. I’m influenced by everything. What I read, what I watch on T.V., what people say to me what happens in my life. I welcome influences. It makes my novel an emergent property of my life and my experiences. And thus, makes it unique to me. I’m good with that.

How much planning do I do?

More than I did when I started out. I started out as a pure pantser. Now I’m a hybrid. But I don’t think I’ll ever get to a stage where I’m a full plotter.

Are ideas hard to come by?

I don’t think they are hard to come by but I think that you can stress about them. It’s easy to think you’ll never have another good idea but for me, the important thing isn’t the idea. It’s the daily writing habit. If you write every day, you end up with a story that can be revised into shape. You can adjust an idea, knock it into shape, turn it into what you like, into something interesting, something artful, something that works. It doesn’t matter what the idea started off as. It only matters what it ends up as.

Ideas are easy. It’s the writing that’s hard. It’s not possible to write an entire novel in a day, but it is possible to come up with an idea in a day.

A disruptive teen shunned by his hometown discovers that there’s a plot to use his town to test a chemical weapon, killing everyone in the name of research. To save them, he pretends to have turned over a new leaf and befriends the most powerful kids in the town only to fall in love with the daughter of the ex-army general in charge of the chemical bombing. The ex-general threatens to kill his own daughter if the teen boy doesn’t leave town without interference. Now the boy must choose between his new love and the town he’s come to love.

This isn’t a great idea or written well, but it took me a minute to come up with it. imagine if I spent a year writing and revising it. It wouldn’t resemble the generic stuff I’ve written here. It would be better and fully formed and morphed into something that interests me and is uniquely my story.

If I’m being honest, there would probably be dragons and magic in it by the time I’m done because I’m not really capable of sticking to real-life stories. I get bored and suddenly everyone has magic and there are flying books, bubble people and talking trees.

What I’m trying to say is that an idea is just a starting point to a story. It’s not the actual story.

When I came up with my idea for Destructive Magic, all I had was my main character and her unusual out-of-control power. Everything else was added bit by bit while I was planning and then while I was writing.

Again for The Search For Magic, I came up with the character first and went from there.

I guess a good question is where do I think ideas come from?

They come from everywhere. Little sparks we have in life when we watch tv, talk to others, read the newspaper, eavesdrop, read books. Little questions like: I wonder what it would be like to be a teenager who’s always forgotten? (Destructive Magic)

Or what would it be like to be a girl in a magic school who thinks magic is stupid. (The Search For Magic)

Or what it would be like to be a parentless boy who spent his entire life in prison only to fall in love with an eighty-year-old mother figure who’s lives a grief-filled, lonely and isolated existence. A lonely life that he can fix if he sticks around long enough (in the face of great personal danger) to figure out how to prevent the event that killed her husband. (Out Of Time)

Okay, that’s all from me tonight. I can’t think of another question to ask myself.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Happy writing,

Joanne.

Micro-tension draft: 82 pages