|
Post by Siana Blackwood on Jul 28, 2015 3:40:32 GMT
It's that time of the month again - the admins are trying to come up with a list of challenges and activities to help everyone sharpen their writing skills and turn all these awesome ideas into books. So, time to find out what everyone wants.
At the moment, Siana is pushing a big planning/writing challenge that runs from August 1st to December 31st. Agent is talking about 100-word stories and magical moments. We also have a bunch of other semi-regular Steve challenges that might make an appearance. BUT... what we really want is a set of challenges for everyone to participate in. That means asking you guys some questions, so here we are.
The questions:
1. What are your goals for August and the rest of the year? Think about skills development as well as concrete 'finish project x' goals. Also, whether or not you'll be participating in NaNoWriMo and how much preparation you want to do.
2. What kinds of forum challenges and activities would best help you achieve your goals? For this question, think about challenges we've run in the past, stuff you've seen on other forums and your own personal ideas. Try to relate it all to the goals you listed for the first question.
|
|
|
Post by laloca on Jul 29, 2015 4:12:19 GMT
My goals include: 1. Edit my recently completed first draft 2. Complete another first draft 3. Write some short stories 4. NaNoWriMo? I'm not sure yet, but probably I'd like to finally win! I am new to the forum, so I am not very familiar with past challenges. I would love something that would help with editing. Also, any challenge that helps me to maintain a daily writing practice. 100-word stories sound interesting.
|
|
|
Post by Siana Blackwood on Jul 29, 2015 4:13:01 GMT
1. What are your goals for August and the rest of the year? Think about skills development as well as concrete 'finish project x' goals. Also, whether or not you'll be participating in NaNoWriMo and how much preparation you want to do.
At the moment, the two really big things I want to do are finish the third draft of The Frozen Tear and write a first draft of Hold the Necrosauce. One of those is editing/rewriting, the other is sorting out a 'chaos draft' and completing a book-length chunk of the overall story. Like a lot of my favourite things, HtN looks like too much story to fit into a single novel.
FT is already in progress, so that's mostly sticking at it for as long as it takes. I'm sort of rewriting by feel at the moment - I don't even really think about what needs to be done to a scene until I get to it. Sounds like a bad idea, but it's working surprisingly well and changes range from 'change tense, change character name/sex' to 'throw it away and write a whole new event that serves more or less the same function'.
HtN is an incomplete 'chaos draft' - a stack of random scenes that when you look at them all together, hint at the overall shape of a story. I'm in the process of designing a planning strategy for tidying it up and filling in all the gaps, and my second big thing for the year is going to be sorting out a detailed plan of the story, then writing a complete first draft. I'm sort of aiming to have the writing phase be NaNoWriMo/NaNoFiMo, which gives me August-October for planning.
So, one very disorganised rewrite and one hyper-organised first draft. There was a point in my writing where I actually thought I'd be able to nail down a step-by-step procedure that would work on every novel. So much for that idea.
2. What kinds of forum challenges and activities would best help you achieve your goals? For this question, think about challenges we've run in the past, stuff you've seen on other forums and your own personal ideas. Try to relate it all to the goals you listed for the first question.
As I think I've said elsewhere, I'm already working on a big planning/writing challenge based around my schedule for Hold the Necrosauce. This is probably going to involve regular planning-related challenges - I'm hoping that as I go through planning and find skills I need to learn more about, I'll be able to find tutorials and exercises on the web, which I'll then share on Steve. Hopefully if anyone else participates in the challenge, they'll also be posting stuff.
(Side note: a lot of this challenge would cross over with an editing/rewriting challenge if anyone wanted to go that way.)
Frozen Tear is probably much simpler. I basically just need a straightforward butt-kicking challenge where I'm committed to adding a certain number of words per week, with some kind of requirement for regular progress reports. Also a deadline. I haven't decided on that yet.
|
|
|
Post by Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍 on Jul 29, 2015 4:48:02 GMT
1. What are your goals for August and the rest of the year? Think about skills development as well as concrete 'finish project x' goals. Also, whether or not you'll be participating in NaNoWriMo and how much preparation you want to do.
-NaNo: Yes. I do not know which story I will do yet. I might break with tradition and do either Into the Dead Red Light fo real, or The Star Dragon. Pure words for Nov & Dec.
-Either way, I need to chaos draft/outline both. The deliverables would be more of a bullet point/phase outline than a traditional one as well as the 9-block grid for each story. I eventually need to get these to a point where I can write the actual first draft during NaNo, as well as do whichever scene my pantsing heart desires while actually knowing where it goes.
-Work on a comic script for storyland, or at least a chaos draft. I'm writing this separately because the outline will probably need to be in a different format, and more defined. Not aiming for completion here, as this is just to get the feel for what is a new format for me. I migt just do a chapter and see how it goes. Subject to change. Deliverables will be an initial script as well as character/world sketches. This is a stretch goal though: good to have, but not a failure point if I don't get to it.
-Clean up The Red Button and do at least one more rewrite/edit. This is a big rewrite, where much of the story will change.
-Finish first draft of my short story Mr. Mayhem.
-Read at least one short story a week.
2. What kinds of forum challenges and activities would best help you achieve your goals? For this question, think about challenges we've run in the past, stuff you've seen on other forums and your own personal ideas. Try to relate it all to the goals you listed for the first question.
Looks like I'm doing writing, rewriting/editing, AND outlining, though not all at the same time. I guess I would need some sort of structured outlining approach. I might just do a 9-block for every arc, and add grids as I create arcs, amd cross off blocks as I flesh em out. I have a fair amount of word count oriented activity as well. Time to get out my word trackers.
Basically, I meed to create a fairly detailed outline, whicn describes things almost down to the scene level, learn how to sustain a plot using real conflict and establishing tension as opposed to plastic puppet binary characters, learn to finish things, and maintain a consistent shchedule.
I will probably edit this post as I think of more stuff.
If anyone has any better suggestions for this stuff though, I'm open to hearing them.
|
|
|
Post by Danielle Wayland on Jul 30, 2015 1:52:28 GMT
1. What are your goals for August and the rest of the year? Think about skills development as well as concrete 'finish project x' goals. Also, whether or not you'll be participating in NaNoWriMo and how much preparation you want to do. Since I'm planning on retrying Rogue's Calling for NaNo, the next couple of months for me will be spent focusing on it. So... Aug: Character Focus. I have scattered notes on my two MC's and a couple other minor characters. I need to hone them in and create a nice detailed file for each character, including their backstory, personality, appearance, their roles/arcs, relationships, anything else I can think of. I'll probably also dabble in doing character profiles for other stories such as Copper Wire and One Gun Salute, but RC is definitely first and foremost. Sept: World Building! All my fantasy stories are set in the same universe (at different periods of times) but I've yet to draw a map and I only have the name of one city and one forest. In fact, I used the name of the forest in my short story Epic Dragon Quest. I'm that lame. So yeah, need to get on that. I figure the best way for me to start is by drawing a blob, short-handing what I need, stick it to my wall and throw darts at it, and go from there. Oct: Outline. With characters set and a hopefully cohesive setting, the next beast to tackle is an outline. I've never done one before. How does one go about practicing such sorcery? Nov: Go big or go home -drops mike- Dec: No idea. If I finish Rogue's Calling first draft, I'll probably put it to rest for a bit and move on to either CW or OGS. If I don't finish it, uh, I'll finish it? Or something. Oh yeah, and work on Epic Dragon Quest. I forgot about the poor thing.2. What kinds of forum challenges and activities would best help you achieve your goals? For this question, think about challenges we've run in the past, stuff you've seen on other forums and your own personal ideas. Try to relate it all to the goals you listed for the first question. Well, I did like the exercises from this thread. Also I guess outline and world building challenges/activities would be fun. Other than that, I dunno, I'm no good at coming up with stuff like that.
|
|