May 25 2009
Making Arrangements
It’s a bit like arranging the patio furniture in the shed so that you can get to it the easiest once the weather is suitable to use it again. That’s the way I’ve been working recently.
I’ve been making logs of the different stories I have that I’ve started. At one point when I was in high school had about 63 different story ideas written down in various notebooks. Since then I’ve realized that not all of those story ideas would work, or I’ve been able to combine some of them together to make them better.
Still my thoughts are generally cluttered and I jump from one to the other to the other without finishing something entirely. This is not a good thing. If I ever want to be published I need to actually be able to finish something, so I’ve decided to be systematic. I’ve been writing out all the various ideas, in brief, and then organizing them. I have several stories which would work along the same “time line” but be at different points, so that shows me I need to actually work on the timeline overall to make sure that I can make each story work and compliment each other without poking holes in my own universe. Others are stand-alones so they could be worked on independently or even in tandem — if I’m feeling particularly masochistic.
Sorting out the time lines and synopses is a good thing though because it means then that I can plan out my method of attack and how I’m actually going to get one story finished and then another, and then another.
