Plot Squeezings

I get to write an entire blog entry about something working right.  I'm very pleased.  ^_^

As I said at the end of my last entry, I planned to take some time to figure out a plot for one of my half-dozen clusters of gathered ideas.  It's really hard for me to work on more than one story at a time (something that needs to change, but that's yet another blog entry), so I took a few days off of editing TAW to hammer this out.  Editing on TAW is going well, by the way; I cleared one of the major hurdles tonight, and there's only two more huge changes to make before I have to rewrite most of the last chapter.  So that's good too.

But, about the plot-in-progress: it didn't crash and burn while I tried to figure it out.  And that alone is reason for celebration.  A small celebration, but still.

A writer whose work I really enjoy - Brian K. Vaughan, who's done mostly comic books and whose stuff you really should read - has been quoted as saying he always knows how a story will end before he starts writing it.  I wholly support this, and I haven't written anything good when I've gone against it.  So when I sat down to plot, I hammered out a few crucial plot details from beginning to end, and started filling things in, finding all the little things that had to happen in between.

And I just kept filling.

It was one of those bizarre moments I think a lot of writers hope for, like the story was already there, I was just digging it out of the blank page.  It's kind of like being an archaeologist, chipping away to find an entire damn dinosaur skeleton buried somewhere in my head.  And the more I wrote, the more I knew, of the plot and the characters and the setting, so I just kept going.  There's always something awesome about realizing a story as I go along, when figuring things out becomes almost effortless.

Of course, the real effort is yet to come.  I still haven't figured out everything; the plot still has some significant holes in it and needs a lot of fleshing out to determine character actions and motivations, and to make sure it works as a whole.  And I have to write the thing, which is always the hardest part, until it's time to edit.  @_@  But for the first time in quite a while, I've got a good feeling about what's there so far, and I'm really eager to keep digging it up.

Especially since this isn't doesn't actually involve a dinosaur skeleton, but a dragon skeleton.

Next entry: inspired by some tweets from earlier this week, a discussion of body image, character, and things we give up to our readers.