Good(ish) Writing Day
An avocado from the photo archives. I think this little guy ended up on a tostada.
I had a cautiously good writing day today. This evening, I drove to Reston Town Center to have dinner with my Godmother. It’s about thirty minutes from my house, and I found myself dwelling on how crappy I have felt about my novel lately while I was driving. I had been kind of playing around with an idea that would be a big change, and during the drive I got more and more excited about the possibilities that a new direction would provide. The biggest thing is that this change kind of turns the novel from a non-speculative one to one with fantastic elements. However, in this case I kind of realized that the story was perfect for some magic because I could really use it in a way that highlighted the real stuff I was concerned about, in this case mostly friendship and feeling un-special issues for the main character. So far, writing with the new plot ideas in mind has been really fun.
Of course, by tomorrow I’ll be in crisis again.
Another thing that kind of started working better just tonight was the use of objects in the story. For example, I had one character who I wanted to call the main character by a nickname. The nickname needed to indicate that the character wasn’t taking MC seriously, but I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t make the other character sound stupid, too. I finally hit open a way to use a song that comes up in the story as a ring tone and as a whistle. Now the nickname connects to the song and I have a kind of object that can come back in to the story. Doesn’t sound very exciting, but this hardly ever happens in a way that feels suitably deliberate.
As I said, tomorrow could be a whole different story. I am once again cautiously pessimistic.