Quantum Storytelling

Sometimes when I read books on writing, it makes me anxious to jump into my story and crank out a scene. “Here I am reading about this stuff when I could be doing it!” Reading books about writing makes me amped to write.

Novelist’s Essential Guide to Crafting Scenes is pretty good if you’re looking for something scene-centric.

The book is a great refresher, and it’s nice to read something focused around the building blocks of stories.

Gasoline on the fire!

When Kath asked me to do some guest blogging over on Writer Unboxed, I was happy to oblige. You can read the first part of How to Make Your Novel into a Media Franchise over on Writer Unboxed. Enjoy!

Since returning from my vacation I’ve been ramping up again with steady drum beat to get my story done. A scene or two per day, as usual. With the steady output, someone asked me today how many scenes I’ve rendered in prose. The answer? I don’t know. When I’m blocking out scenes, I do count them out. Somewhere between fifty and sixty makes up a good visual, Hollywood style story. It’s nice to know where I am while I’m plotting.

As I’m rendering the scenes, I really don’t want to know how many I’ve done or how many I have left. Why? I don’t know, it makes me anxious. I guessed today, and I think I’ve got fifteen, or maybe twenty scenes done. But I really don’t know, and I’m afraid to look.

It’s like watching the clock all day. The more you look at the clock, the more slowly the time passes, and the longer things seem to take. You’ll swear it was two hours and it’s only been twenty minutes. That kind of thing is agonizing, and it happens to me when I write. I always feel like I’ve made more progress than I really have. And then I look at the mountain of work in front of me and get discouraged.

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