Today's #100daysofwriting prompt has to do with a thought-tool for characters: goal, motivation, and conflict.
...and that is all well and dandy, but I'm not working on anything right now -- at least, not in earnest -- and that's what I'd like to talk about instead.
...and that is all well and dandy, but I'm not working on anything right now -- at least, not in earnest -- and that's what I'd like to talk about instead.
In terms of statistics, I already mentioned the monumental first-year I had in 2016, in terms of writing, but 2017 was actually my biggest year: 302,067 words. My Ao3 stats don't tell the whole story, either, because I worked on a collaborative project with my now-partner, then-enticing-stranger (it's another story; just wait), which is over 150,000 words long. If we assume that I wrote about half of those, it's an extra 75,000 words that never saw the light of day. All of those numbers make 2017 -- the year after the bad year -- my most productive ever.
2018 tapered to 139,973, which is still the length of two small novels, right? But the luster was almost gone, then, and everything I wrote started to feel like something I'd already written. 2019 and 2020 came in at only 13,119 and 15,910 respectively, as a result.
There is this one story from 2018, though, that almost broke the mold -- I had that feeling of wildness and wonder that story-telling sometimes gives me. It's called A Simple Truth and it features a different kind of GMC -- people struggling with a goal of large, societal, proportion, motivation to do it together, but external conflicts utterly outside their control, which eventually beat them. It's a rather sad story... and it never got very many hits, but I think it's one of my favorite things I've ever written. It's interesting when that happens -- people latch onto a thing or they don't.
2018 tapered to 139,973, which is still the length of two small novels, right? But the luster was almost gone, then, and everything I wrote started to feel like something I'd already written. 2019 and 2020 came in at only 13,119 and 15,910 respectively, as a result.
There is this one story from 2018, though, that almost broke the mold -- I had that feeling of wildness and wonder that story-telling sometimes gives me. It's called A Simple Truth and it features a different kind of GMC -- people struggling with a goal of large, societal, proportion, motivation to do it together, but external conflicts utterly outside their control, which eventually beat them. It's a rather sad story... and it never got very many hits, but I think it's one of my favorite things I've ever written. It's interesting when that happens -- people latch onto a thing or they don't.
An opposite example is The Third Floor. (It has 100 comment threads... vs 16 on A Simple Truth.) It started as an experiment -- I wanted to play around with right-justified, bracketed text to convey subconscious concepts, rather than thoughts; I wanted to feel through addiction and recovery -- but it really caught on. It's actually unbelievable how many people sent me notes that it spoke to them. I'm super thankful, of course, but I never even thought it was that special. Ha. Maybe I'll spend a whole entry talking about the things I like (or don't) among my writing projects. We'll see...