For someone who's officially between jobs at the moment I'm finding myself surprisingly busy. Or perhaps I'm just finding way to make myself surprisingly busy, which, when I think about it, would be surprisingly unsurprising (or rather unsurprisingly unsurprising).
That said, I've managed to get some novel-the-second work done. I spent a lot of time listening to Mike Stackpole's twenty-one days to writing a novel podcasts last week in the hope of picking up some advice about what I did wrong when I was writing Muse-that-was, or at least on how to make my life easier this time around. Whilst I didn't find everything that I was looking for (for example, I'm not much for outlining beyond a sort of rough sketch of the story) it did give me some hints about how to go about getting to know my characters.
It's funny, actually, that it's taken me so long to get to the point where I'm getting people down on paper. For someone who's trying to write one or more novels I'm remarkably reticent to do half of the things that people suggest you do in order to get that hundred thousand words written.
My usual bible for writing is Stephen King's On Writing, which pretty much eschews the idea of outlining in favour of the story shaping itself. Whilst I'm sure that that's a pretty good idea, because stories are living things and not easy to force into one given shape or another, it's not something that I've found easy to do. Like any other writer I run out of steam at times, and its at those moments that you need something to keep you reasonably on track. This is where outlines, however vague, come in.
So the moleskine notebook that I bought a while back - well, one of them anyway - is filling up with character notes, motivations, possible conflicts and so on. There are three characters taking shape at the moment: the hero, who so far remains resolutely nameless, a female not-quite-lead, not-quite-background character who will, if I'm right about how her particular story will unfold, have a powerful effect on the aforementioned hero, and a second male character who is so vague as to be utterly unhelpful, but is at least vague for the reason that he himself is a very vague, odd kind of person.
The latter two are the only ones who have faces and definite presences in my mind, which is rather annoying. I'd much rather that I knew what my hero looked like. Maybe he'll become clearer the further I get.
I still don't quite know when I'm going to start actually writing the thing yet, though it looks like Stackpole's twenty-one days might not actually be that far off the mark. I guess we'll see.
This post was supposed to be about TV and the quality thereof and has ended up not being, which is also surprisingly unsurprising.
