Yes, I’m still doing my Baker’s Dozen challenge. I wrote for two days on a story that I couldn’t really get into shape, and so had to change, start writing a different story, one that I believe I’ll be able to finish by Friday.
What happened with the first one? Two things.
1–I know it’s a story, I know the arc of it. I can still easily conjure the voice of the person telling the story. But that was the problem — she’s pretty strong-headed, and wants to tell the story her way, with flashbacks and jumping right in and it just wasn’t working as a story. No one but me would ever understand it, not the way she insisted on telling it.
2–As a result of #1, I kept imposing my “authorial voice” on her. And it pissed her off and she’d get quiet and I’d lose all the momentum I’d built up. I could tell the story my way, I knew how it was supposed to go, but without her Voice and input, the story was pretty dead in my hands.
I may go back and pick up her thread, let her have her head and tell her story her way. I may end up with something. Yet again, I may not. Part of the point of these 13 weeks is to finish a story a week. If I’d continued on the previous story, I couldn’t guarantee I’d have something. So I picked up a different story instead — smaller, very creepy, but doable. And I have a lot of energy for it. (Current title is, “Magpie.”) I’m typing it straight into the computer, as I’ve managed to do that one or two times before with short stories. If I start having problems with this story I’ll switch to hand writing.
And all of that, the switching and trying new stories and new process and new things is such a huge part of why I’m doing this challenge, to give myself the freedom to write in whatever damn way works for me at the moment.
PS. I’d typed this up, then found out Steve Jobs had died. I won’t do an RIP post, but consider this: the iPod came out in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010. The world changed after each.