I broke the belated 7,000 word mark on this new story the other night. I haven't been able to consistently knock out the 1,000 word per day minimum I'd loosely wanted to achieve, and not because, as much as I'm tempted to place responsibility wholly on external causes, I haven't had enough time.
Well, in part that's actually true - I haven't had enough time to achieve that kind of result. That's just how it's been since late December/early January: my first niece was born, followed by my mum's arrival from the UK, my second niece's birth, my dad's departure for life in Thailand, my involvement in various design projects I've been trying to develop personally and getting people to take a look at my novella manuscript. And work. Work takes time, too. None of it's bad, of course, or at least not bad to any significant degree, but it does mean I haven't had the time to focus on getting words down on paper. Or screen, as is actually the case.
However, I'm experiencing one of those times I think many writers must have wherein the story is just sitting around, waiting to be told, but before it can be the build-in has to be written: the slower, less-action-packed introduction of the main plot without giving the main plot away, the implication of something else being afoot or the suggestion of a twist to justify the story's existence in the first place. Who wants to write all of that boring stuff? Well, I do, yeah, but I want to tell the story - not spend time laying the foundation for it.
Which is, of course, difficult. You can't build on ground you haven't prepared to hold a structure; you can't launch into a story and expect it to stand up to scrutiny when you haven't actually told the pre-story aspects of it. A plot can only take a story so far. The rest has to be about the people the plot happens to and how they respond to the major points along the way.
I once wrote part of a story I may have mentioned before called Chimaera, having only the vaguest semblance of a plan for its plot. I made it to the 10,000 word mark and realised (as I believe I may have detailed in a previous entry, but if not, here it is!) that I didn't really have a proper reason for the story to be 10,000 words long. It was a story not really being told, almost. A long story not being told. As you might imagine, 10,000 words is a fair bit of time and effort for not a whole lot.
Of course, it wasn't that not a whole lot had happened within those 10,000 words; a lot had. But I'd added elements in that I had thought about as interesting additions but which hadn't really earnt a place in those 10,000 words; they weren't necessarily contributing to a set goal at all, instead suggesting some nebulous idea of a goal that I hadn't really set in stone. The words are there, the ideas are there, just where are they leading? I'm still not 100% sure on it.
In this case, though, I'm sure. 7,000 words isn't a short story. Technically it very well could be, actually. It's certainly a long essay. But it's not an introduction to a story, is what I mean, as much as it is. In 7,000 words a lot can happen, even if it doesn't seem to be. At this point I've introduced the protagonist, the deuteragonist, and several others who generally might count as a collective tritagonist given that now that I've begun writing about them, a secondary plot has cropped up as a potential alter-aspect of the primary plot.
I like to write organically, I'll admit: I've said before that I've tried and failed at writing purely organically, as in, without a planned-out scaffold upon which to build a full story, but I can't spend a decade on the other hand planning out a story and having everything squared away before I start writing. It just doesn't work for me. I need some freedom to flesh things out, at least, and to weave in extra filaments - something I was still doing not so many months ago when I realised I could expand my novella to include a character who had previously been more just a plot device as a more rounded individual whose presence was greater than to merely propel the story between points a and b. In the case of this newer story I went a bit overkill with the plan, I think, but in a good way: I started with three pages from start to finish, and then began again, adding detail into the story in its plan form, ending up with 24 or so pages in total before writing commenced. Yet even with that this subplot hadn't really occurred to me until I was able to think about whether two characters who were exhibiting similar behaviour were linked in more ways than just that they lived in the same place and each had young-ish children. As you might guess...the answer is a resounding yes. The situation has moved from them simply being general neighbours who experience the same things in the story to them being sisters - a fairly simple transition, but one which allows a wealth more undercurrents to be brought into the story. And I'm pretty excited about that.
It's late, and frankly I suppose my entire point was that I'm excited I have 7,000 words, even though it's taken me so long, and also that even as I'm writing the story is crafting itself. That's what happened with my novella, too: as I wrote it, it showed more of itself as it should be written. I'll go ahead and say I could very well beat 40,000 words this time!
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