Getting ready to lay some serious groundwork
As I mentioned last night, I’m working on my current Project using Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s Book in a Month system. Technically, I’m using a modified version of her system – some of her methods, as well as the forms she provides aren’t the way I think. You can see what I mean by checking out the pdf versions of the forms.
They’re pretty to look at and the information they’re asking you to complete is GREAT information to have down before you begin a 30-day intensive writing stint… but they’re not very practical. Or, they’re not very practical for me. If I were to handwrite everything in them, I’d not have enough space to fully answer the question. The fact that they’re non-writable PDFs mean that I can’t type in the answers and store the whole thing neatly in my project folder. It MAKES me have to store my project in two separate places.
Also, and probably my biggest complaint about the book is that, if you do her system the way she has it laid out, you’re really not even beginning the outline until Day 1… which is the day you’re supposed to start writing. To me – and this is just me, mind you – many of the tasks she asks you to complete during Week 1 (and let’s not even get into what she’s asking on Weeks 2-4) seem like things that should already be done before you’ve started writing.
If it sounds like I’m being hyper-critical, it’s because I am… but it’s on purpose. If I’m going to finish an entire rough draft in 30 days, I NEED to make this system work for me. If that means recreating her forms into versions I can actually USE, so be it. If that means filling out those forms before I start my Day 1 (with the exception of the Story Tracker, which, I must admit, is probably one of the most genius writing tools ever invented… No joke – we’re talking up there with paper, the printing press and the word processor. I’ll post about that later, though), so be it.
These next few posts are my answers to the questions she poses to writers. They’re things that writers should ask themselves before they begin writing. At first glance, they seemed flowery – inane, touchy-feely garbage that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But a few things happened that changed my mind and led me to rethink not only my commitment to writing, but my reasons for that believing that commitment was necessary.
The first thing was experiencing a recent medical issue that required an overnight hospital stay all alone. With Jim away on the other side of the world, me living 2 hours away from the nearest person who gave a shit about me, and a dead cell battery because I grossly misjudged the length of the adventure, I was struck by how suddenly very needy and alone I really was. How does this tie into writing? Strangely enough, it was the narrative in my head that kept me going during those harrowing hours. I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time, but once I was out of the hospital and recounting to friends and family the hilarious tale of “The Night Mo Was Unwillingly Confronted by 4 of Her 5 Biggest Fears,” I realized that I had been writing the whole time, despite not having anything to physically write with. Each time I retold the story, I was able to take what worked from my previous performances and use them to either enhance or completely edit out the elements of the story that didn’t. I realized that even though I was talking, the writer in me was shining brightly.
The other thing was re-reading some of the posts here… most specifically, this one. Which led me to re-reading this post (written by a writer and friend that I respect more than I could ever properly express), which hit me and inspired me all over again in completely different ways than it had the first time I read it.
In the end, I realized that even if the questions seem like flowery, inane, touchy-feely garbage, they are still questions that I SHOULD be able to answer. They fall right in line with the themes of those posts: Do I love The Art in me? Do I love ME in the art? And, surprisingly, a question that I never pondered before, despite it staring me in the face longer than I care to admit: Why am I so afraid to open my own Mystery Box? (Seriously, if you’re an aspiring-to-be-published writer and you didn’t read Erik’s post, you need to get on that immediately.)
And now, it’s time for me to do some serious ground work because I want to start my Day 1 on July 12th. I know, it seems like a weird start date, but you have to understand my mom and her complicated “Birthday Mathematics” that will make it impossible to be able to accomplish anything useful during the weekend of July 9th.
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