The Value of Photography

As I was writing some scenes, I ran into a road block.  These scenes take place at a location I hadn't been to in years.  My memory of that place was pretty rusty. In addition, this location is a setup for the final third of the book.  If I don't have a ring of truth to the description of the location, it won't seem authentic.  I can fabricate some of it, and I'm definitely fabricating the locations that don't exist, but they're all based on real locations that I've been to or experienced.  I wanted this location to be as real as possible.

Luckily, this place, while having a lot of security guards, didn't actually have that much in a way of real security.  I found that if I dressed the part, looked like I knew where I was going and generally looked like I belonged there, I wouldn't get hassled.  Putting a phone up to my ear, and walking fast, I was able to avoid talking to any of the security guards.  I was able to go to the different floors and get to where I needed.  I took my small camera and took shots from where my character would be looking.

It's one thing to enter a space and enjoy it for what it is.  It's entirely another to enter a space and look at it through the eyes of your character.  Admittedly, that was very fun.

So as soon as I got home, I wrote out as much as I could and looked over the photographs that I took.  It was plenty of good, creative fuel that I channeled into my story.

Flow

I like when the just words flow out. I had a couple of 3000 plus days. I've been feeling very productive and have been happy with the writing. I guess that's a side benefit of having scenes clear in your head before putting them down.

I know there are a couple of plants and setups I need to add in to make the plot work, but I will go back and do that later. I sometimes question those folks who suggest that you get the entire story down on paper before you go back and do any revisions. Does it count as a revision if you forgot a crucial plot element? If I wait too long, will I forget the things that came to me after I wrote it?

I will go back and fix some stuff that I just wrote and then move on to the next chapters.

Illness and Productivity

I hate being sick. For the past two weeks, I have been wrestling with walking pneumonia and a sinus infection. I let it keep me from writing. It's one thing to not be in the mood to work, but it's a complete waste of time to force yourself to produce crap through the haze of a pounding headache, vomiting and diarrhea. Even if I had gotten stuff done, I suspect that I would only have to redo it.

Instead, I took advantage of my memory. I played out scenes and conversations as I envisioned them. I thought about past chapters and what I could do to improve them. I let myself have some wild dreams about the characters and story. None of the dreams produced any visuals that would make sense if I included them, but I do rely heavily on my dream imagery.

So today, I was able to get up to about 3500 words. I feel good about that. My mind had been replaying these scenes which made it easy to just sit down and type them. I also took a trip out to one of the locations so I could take in some environmental details. Hypothetically, my meal could be tax deducted as research.

In any case, I feel like I am in the homestretch. Much of these upcoming chapters towards the end have been clearer to me than these chapters in the middle. If all goes well, barring any unforseen circumstances, I should be able to wrap up my first draft before the end of this month.

Forcing yourself to write

Skipped the workshop tonight. Wasn't feeling it. Lack of sleep and sporatic nosebleeds made me rethink going.

Did over 3000 words today. Feels good, man.

When life gets in the way

Yesterday sucked with doctor's appointments and trips to the pharmacy.  I was determined to get some writing done today in spite of feeling like crap.  Almost 2500 words today.  Yay me!  I might even get more done tonight.

At a Loss for Words

In my zeal to keep writing, I'm writing on both my desktop and my laptop.  The problem is one is PC and the other is a Mac, respectively.  In addition, I haven't figured out how to save drafts from my PC anywhere other than locally.  I can't see the iCloud from my PC.  I'm using Scrivener, which I like a lot, but I dislike that the PC version hasn't caught up to the Mac version.

So as a result of multiple drafts, I lost about a 1000 words.  I looked through all previous iterations and I saw that my most recent saves had been corrupted.  I had somewhere to go and I decided to just rewrite that section.  What other choice did I have?  The other good thing with having multiple copies and versions there were some earlier chapters that were just gone so I was able to recover those as well.  What sucked was that the missing chapter seemed to be filled with a blank unicode text that I couldn't access.  So it was still there, kinda, but just out of reach.

Anyway, the main elements were still fresh in my head so I was able to crank out over 1000 words in an hour and a half.  I don't know if that is super impressive, but it goes to show that the clearer you are in knowing what you want to say, the faster you can proceed.  I think that applies to most things, not just writing.

Also, again, nothing beats research.  There's nothing better than going to an environment where your characters are going to interact and thinking about their reactions to the location.  I didn't want to bring my laptop with me so I emailed my thoughts to myself.  I also found a new location to set up a scene that I hadn't considered before.  That was a fortuitous surprise.

I'm looking foward to this afternoon when I can make those thoughts congeal.

Authenticity

So I'm working on a novel about a killer and I realize that I feel pretty fake writing about some scenes, specifically the ones about firing a rifle.  To that end, I decided to go to a local gun range.  I thought I would look at guns that were available for purchase, try and get inside my protagonist's head.  Fortunately, there was a gun range and I was able to rent a rifle and shoot.  I had shot guns before, but they were semi-automatics.  I hadn't ever fired a bolt action rifle.

I was fortunate to get set up with Garrett, an Iraq war veteran who showed me how to properly stand and fire the gun.

I think I did fairly well considering this was my first time.  I opted not to get a crazy paper target like a zombie or something.  I just chose a simple target and went for it.

The place had advertising on the street where you could fire a machine gun which is why I suspect most of the people were there.  Some retired looking guys were kind enough to take my picture.  However the bullet holes in the target didn't show up very well with my black jacket behind it.

I went home and took a better shot of the target with some light behind so you can see the center mass grouping of the shots.  

All in all, I thought it was a good research trip.  I saw some knives and I almost bought one, till I saw the price.  Other than that, there isn't anything better than actually doing some research and taking trips to where the story is taking place and experiencing it as the character.  If you have the means, I highly suggest doing it.  That's not to say that you can't completely fabricate a location based on an amalgamation of your memories.  That's totally possible.  I've done it and hopefully, it's convincing enough to the reader.

Word Count

Currently my word count is about 1500 words a day.  I think I could jack that up further if I avoid editing as I go along.

I feel tempted to write scenes on from my other outlines, but I think I must make getting the first book out the door the priority.  When I first started my word count was at about 4000 per day.  But I think the issue more than anything is time management.

I will write at least another 1000 words after the kids go to bed tonight.