After my crisis of confidence and accepting that I can do this serial fiction project and not screw it up, my Muse has been exploding with ideas.
She’s gotten rather chatty concerning some of the initial storylines I have in mind. Two of them are forming up nicely I think.
I believe I have a path forward now. I’m going to start dedicating some time each day to work on the development of the initial two storylines, as well as trying to get some words on the page. I want to try to build up some backlog before launching so I have a little breathing space. Writing ‘on the edge’ of production every day is a little too tight for my tastes. I know there will be inevitable problems that are going to interfere with my production. I want a little ‘wriggle room’ where I don’t have to wake up at 5:00 AM panicking that I don’t have a post for the day ready to go.
A long time ago I did the Morning Brain Dumps, where I started a story with no plot or characters or any real idea of what I was going to do. Sort of like doing NaNoWriMo for a entire year. One of the big philosophies of NaNoWriMo was ‘no plot, no problem’, meaning that if you just got started, somehow your story would magically come together as you wrote it. This is the way ‘pantsers’ (those who write ‘by the seat of their pants’) develop their stories. On the opposite side of the scale are the ‘plotters’, who develop their story, sometimes in great detail, before they start writing it.
While I did manage to write something every day, the stories were not good. They didn’t develop very well. They didn’t magically come together. There is something there in a few of them, possibly worthy of revision into more coherent stories.
The Morning Brain Dumps were written on an earlier version of my blog and not all of them made the transfer over. I really need to go hunt down the missing ‘episodes’ and replace them on the blog here. If nothing else, they serve as a measure of how much I’ve (hopefully) improved since they were written.
I would really like to avoid falling back to that level because I didn’t plan ahead and do better at developing the stories that go into the serial fiction. I’m not a plotter, but I’m not a pantser either. I’m somewhere in between. I like to have an idea of what my story is and what I can do with it before I start. But I also know that the story is likely to end up very different from the way I imagine it in my head before I begin. Almost all of my writing ends up like that. I’m trusting that it is my Muse handling the changes and knows better than me at what needs to be in the story. I’ve gone back to stories I wrote that turned out different than I expected and seen clues planted in them that could be turned into further stories.
Since I’m hoping to make this into a money-making venture I want the quality to be as good as possible. I trust my Muse will put in twists and turns to keep things interesting. I don’t think she’ll write me into any corners that I can’t get back out of again. And if she does, well, it’s a soap opera. They are known for doing some wild things with their storylines. I trust I can do something similar without stretching the bounds of the fiction reality too much.
Anyway, as Stan Lee used to say, ‘Excelsior!’
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