Writing Process: Thinking in Pictures

Tuesday nights are my writing nights.  I left the house and hung out at the local supermarket (they have a nice mezzanine area that's usually not too crowded with other Patrons with Deep Personal Problems Which They Must Share With the General Populous).

Although it's a bad precedent, I decided to switch stories.  The one I was working on for Sword and Sorceress wants to be a novella or novel, and I need a short story (preferably 2000 to 3000 words).  Ignoring for the moment the advice of Jake Lake to Finish What You Start, I'm putting aside the mushrooming story for something simpler.

I want to write a story about a sorceress; the sorcery she does is tolerated by the locals, and part of the price of doing the magic results in a light shunning (they do need her for her spells, they just don't completely approve).

One of the first things I did was to think about the main character and where she lives in terms of pictures.  In the upper corner of my page, I drew an X for milieu, a heart for character, a ? for idea/mystery and a fulcrum for status quo to remind myself how I want to think about the plot.  I want to make this plot a status quo and character story.

Then I drew a hut.  Which led to a village.  Which led to general world-building.  And funny hats.  Now I have a kind of an idea how these people move based on the kinds of clothes they wear.

And I drew a volcano!  And finally, a wyvern, because if you're going to have a fantasy story, you're going to need these sorts of things.  Not to mention a volcano is an effective way to change the status quo so that the characters have to deal with it (argh! a giant wyvern has been stirred up by the volcano and now it's eating our sheep and our fields are covered in ash).

I actually wrote down something approximating an outline, because I'm trying to teach myself the discipline of outlining.  I hate outlines; they feel confining and when I force myself to stick with them, the characters decide they're going to do something different.

If I could just outline in pictures, I think I'd be set.

Writing with the Sphinx

The last two days, the morning sunlight has shone on our garden sphinx, turning her stoney countenance rosey. When it happened yesterday, I looked up from writing and it seemed as if a person in an Egyptian headdress crouched amidst the squill and Portuguese laurels.

I almost went out in my bathrobe with a camera. But then I decided that I would consine the vision to memory. I have pictures of the sphinx already, and they never quite turn out the way I see them in my mind's eye. Besides, sometimes Mark accuses me of living behind a camera.

And, if I was photographing the sphinx, I wouldn't be writing, which was the reason I was stumbling about before dawn in the first place.

This morning the rising sun performed its magic again. This time I noticed the cherry blossoms scattered on the lawn. I almost photographed her again. But as the shone moved and highlighted different features, I looked up at her between working on the current short story. Which was stubbornly being difficult.

The characters did something unexpected and threw my outline out, which meant I had to stop writing and try to follow where they were going. I've gotten into a bad habit of editing in my head while I write, which slows down the transcription process. And when the characters take an unexpected turn, it slows the word count further. I know several folks who just write whatever comes out and then go back and edit and revise later; supposedly this is faster than dealing with the word buffer in my head.

And now the Day Jobbe calls...