Showing posts with label story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label story. Show all posts

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Thanksgiving Day Thoughts

I'm sitting in Chicago with my wife's family. It's cold out. Winter always reminds me of being unproductive - hunkered down in your house, wishing the cold away, and keeping yourself occupied until spring. The food is good: Ashley's grandmother is a great cook.

I'm not writing, though. I haven't in a few days honestly. It's disappointing, but I had a productive day the other day going through and plotting out my stories. After the other day (when I posted about my stories lacking plot), I realized that my stories are driven by characters and concepts. Many times they lack in a cohesive, linear plot. Sometimes that's not a bad thing, but as a standard, I don't like it. So I'm working on some more linear thoughts and seeing about
making my stories more functional. It's one thing to have conceptually- founded stories - indeed I quite like them - but to have stories with only a concept and no plot to drive the story just doesn't work.

So I've been debating doing something with my writing that I've never done: outline. I have never really thought of outlining as a good method for my writing, because I like to produce things very environmentally: that is, I like to write what comes to me and polish it later. What I've discovered, however, is that my mind wanders and when it wanders, so does the story. I don't always know how I want to the story to end, so I don't entirely know how to write the story to get to that point - especially if I'm going on the fly. Writing up an outline for a story might help alleviate some of my frustrations with not being able to produce those cohesive stories I desire.