Halfway through the week, I’ve added a few thousand words and laid down the bedrock for about half of the climax.
These intense typing sessions are very unusual: I normally sit down to the blank cursor feeling as though I’m leaning out over a cliff and the wind is turning. I know what plot is required, but how am I supposed to make it exciting and interesting? What will people say?
A small, desperate idea comes. What if, while trying to say something, a character is interrupted? By whom, and why? Maybe the other person has something to say, and they’re both trying to say it at once? How would you do that — what would the dialogue look like, how much would each person get out in each broken sentence, and how much stage direction should be interspersed to keep a sense of where, when and how?
More importantly, how can I somehow crowbar this hoary old device into my plot just to get me going?
Let’s not call it an idea. Let’s call it an excuse.
So the typing begins, and the competing dialogue idea gets used, and now the cursor is flowing along nicely. There’s a way to get into the plot proper, and here it comes, and suddenly it’s three thirty and five new pages exist. Maybe that dialogue trick will stay in and maybe it won’t, but that’s a question for later. The question for now is: now that I’ve stopped to check the time and count pages, how do I deal with this blinking cursor?
What if…
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Halfway through the week, I’ve added a few thousand words and laid down the bedrock for about half of the climax.
These intense typing sessions are very unusual: I normally sit down to the blank cursor feeling as though I’m leaning out over a cliff and the wind is turning. I know what plot is required, but how am I supposed to make it exciting and interesting? What will people say?
A small, desperate idea comes. What if, while trying to say something, a character is interrupted? By whom, and why? Maybe the other person has something to say, and they’re both trying to say it at once? How would you do that — what would the dialogue look like, how much would each person get out in each broken sentence, and how much stage direction should be interspersed to keep a sense of where, when and how?
More importantly, how can I somehow crowbar this hoary old device into my plot just to get me going?
Let’s not call it an idea. Let’s call it an excuse.
So the typing begins, and the competing dialogue idea gets used, and now the cursor is flowing along nicely. There’s a way to get into the plot proper, and here it comes, and suddenly it’s three thirty and five new pages exist. Maybe that dialogue trick will stay in and maybe it won’t, but that’s a question for later. The question for now is: now that I’ve stopped to check the time and count pages, how do I deal with this blinking cursor?
What if…