Finally.

[temporus]

Story number two for the year, complete.  7200 words.   Can't I write something short?  Please?   Bah, I'll take it down a peg or three in the revision, but, it's draining doing that.   How's about I learn to be concise to begin with.   Yeah.  That'll happen any day now.

This was a story a long time coming.   I think it's a Fantasy.  Not sure.  Might qualify as Magical Realism.   I wrote up the outline for it over a year ago now.  It got sidelined when I started on my 2005 Nano novel, which became the beast that took over a year of my life.  When that was done, I just didn't have it in me to work on this one at the time.  But I had the whole story basically worked out, even though I had started on it twice before now.   This month, I decided I needed to write it, to get it out, and have done with that idea.   Did it work?   I don't know yet, if I still have the urge to write more stories set in Africa, I'll have to make another trip there. 

Now on to the next project.   I'll probably start a revision of an older story.   I've got one ready to be revised, it'll take some major surgery.  Hopefully, I can do it justice.  I had mixed reactions to it from the last critique group that read it.  Some liked it as it was, but many wanted more "story" to it.  I think I have the solution, we'll see.

Comments

[l-clausewitz.livejournal.com]

Hm. Being concise? I've found that outlining helps--it usually lets me put more words into the important parts and use less for the not-so-important ones. But it's not a surefire mechanism even for me, so I can't guarantee it'll work just as well (or better) with you.

[temporus.livejournal.com]

The irony is this is the first short story that I used a formal outline to develop. My first attempt failed to produce more than a smattering of badly formed thoughts. So I dumped that first page or so, and went back and used a new process from a book on writing I had bought.

I like to try different methods, because you never know what will work for you. This method though ended up quite long in the execution. Putting aside the 14 month delay where I worked on other projects instead, this still took several months to work through. The method involved a lot of note cards, all kinds of thinking about the project, from the more "obvious" things, such as thinking through all your main characters, their motivations, etc, to what your target audience was, who you planned to sell the story to.

Granted, it was the first time I was trying this method out, so it was taking much longer than it probably would if I just knew how to do each step and wasn't working through the process constantly checking in a workbook, etc. And once I just transformed the notes into a more standard outline, and sat down to just do the deed, it took about 10 days to write. Give or take a day of skipped writing in there where too much life was happening at home.

But maybe you are right. Afterall, this was only 7200 words. Last story was 8400. Looks like the outline saved me abot 1200 words. :)

[pamphiliawrites.livejournal.com]

Good for you Ed! Keep writing!