This was the week that four bloggers of my acquaintance all, in somewhat different ways, threw out the plans they’d made and started to make some real progress.
1. First of all, a big “Welcome back!” to Bel at alreadynotpublished, who posted again after a hiatus: “Oh, that’s why…“
2. Maggie at Maggie Madly Writing wrote a “July Camp Update” about how she made progress at Camp NaNoWriMo.
3. Laura Stanfill had a six-day writing retreat, and found her novel-in-progress going in unexpected directions as she finished her second draft(!!).
4. The fourth one was me, as I reported last time, when I gave up my plan and started to get some real work done.
More of part two of my story is posted. In this part, two of my characters met for the first time. I’ve been writing about one of them for over twenty years and the other for about fifteen, so this is something of an event.
And one of them immediately started putting some serious moves on the other one.
Which was not part of any plan of mine.
But I immediately started to see how useful this could be. One of them (the aggressor, in this case) is not very verbal, and several readers have wanted to know more about her. If this flirtation turns into something serious, it could be a way to accomplish that (without getting into a lot of exposition, which I don’t want to do).
One the other hand, for writers who really want to follow a detailed plan and no fooling around, there’s this.
Thanks for linking to me!
I read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat a few years ago. It got me depressed that almost every film (well, American film) was written with that same “American summer movie” formula in mind. So I started watching more foreign movies, since they aren’t usually that formulaic. But if the formula works… might as well recycle it!
On the other hand, it is helpful to have a formula that so many stories fit neatly into… especially if you’re struggling with a plan of your own invention.
It certainly has been a week of unpredictably writing, but you know what for all four of us you listed it has been positive and a break through. Yeah us!
Maggie: Well, certainly anybody who wants to make a career of making movies needs to be aware of this formula, since that’s the standard studios will be expecting.
I agree that it’s somewhat depressing, but it makes me especially appreciate the writers who don’t follow it. Tarantino doesn’t, for example. He uses some of those “beats” (every writer does), but not according to that sequence (remember the structure of Pulp Fiction, for example), and some of them not at all.
And one thing (of many) that I enjoyed about Les Miserables is how it was obviously not following any story-structure rule book, as I talked about here.
http://u-town.com/collins/?p=3917
Bel: Welcome back, and I’m glad to see you posting again. And so far, I’m still cooking along with my story. Best of luck with yours.