Writer Wins

I had an epic win once, and it quite shook me at the same time.

My WIP is in the Renaissance, so I needed some information regarding the military commanders. Sometimes I keep having weird dreams and one night I dreamt of walking around in a library and nearly tripping on a book. I picked it up and started reading, some stuff about French knights (I've been reading extensively about Agincourt in the past days, so that explains it - in case you don't know, French knights were completely annihilated by English longbowmen at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415). Then some commander of Renaissance knights comes up, some guy called Montmorency.

Whatever, I ignored it and left my dream alone.

Fast forward a week or so. That Montmorency guy came back in my head, it kept bugging me. I knew I read about the guy somewhere, something was wrong, why do I keep remembering Montmorency.

By then I reached a point where I needed a high ranked guy to act in some secretive talks. I started searching for the top commander of the French forces in those days, around 1520-1530 ish. It was King Francis, but the marshal or constable of France, I needed his name, so I started researching even more.

His name?

Anne de Montmorency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_de_Montmorency

I stared for two minutes at the damn screen without knowing what the **** just happened.

Eddyz Aquila said:

I dreamt of walking around in a library and nearly tripping on a book.

Click to expand...

I love how you kept tripping over the book in the dream. Perfect.

I had something like this happen the other day. I had read (on a forum here) about a Sci Fi short story contest, checked it out and thought if I could come up with an idea, I would enter.

I went to watch a little TV, just mulling over the contest theme, thinking, wonder if I can get an idea?, when this image came to me of a young man watching some kind of camp, waiting with his dog. I got the idea this was some post-apocalyptic story, and thought, well, I'll work on this later, could be good.

Except, it wouldn't let me wait until later--I had to get up and start writing, and five hours and 3200 words later, I had a story. Whew!

This kind of push to write a story has only happened to me once before, and it felt so odd, like this young man was telling me what to write. It was wicked cool.

I solved an extremely long standing problem that I've had with every book -- and fixed three other recurrent problems by fixing the one.

Subplots did not evolve naturally for me. No matter what I tried, nothing worked. Absolutely nothing. I'd run short (one of the other problems), and I'd try to shoehorn one in. I tried placeholders, tried to plan for them -- I could not get any into the story.

I took Holly Lisle's How to Revise Your Novel. Went through most of it and could not resolve the problem. People were telling me I just couldn't see the subplots, but they weren't in there. At all. Neither was theme, as I discovered. People kept telling me I just wasn't seeing theme and that it was in there. No, it was not. I was at the point where I decided there weren't going to be any subplots.

Then I got to connecting up the conflicts and instantly got the overall picture of the story: There was a line in the middle of my story. Second half, fantastic. First half didn't connect to it. I knew I'd had problems with story setup -- a recurrent problem on all my projects. I tend to start too late, the opposite of what most people do. At that point, I was also researching my organizational processes (I'm right-brained) to help solve the problem. I ran across a site where I discovered that while I'm good at seeing the big picture, I have trouble seeing it right at the beginning of the project. I could not see the right place to start the story.

Now I paid a lot of attention to the setup. I spent a considerable amount of effort fixing the front half of the book (all done with 'scene cards' -- in my case, One Note -- and no actual writing). I focused on figuring out where the story needed to start. A new character introduced himself into the story, and then a second one. Along with them came two subplots, both plot-focused. Theme also came in, and I added enough scenes for 90K. For anyone saying they wish they could start a story too late, by my estimate, I added 33K in front of my original beginning, and because I didn't start it in the right place, the setup forced its way in the wrong place -- and kept subplots and theme from coming in at all.

Now I have almost 18K written, and my scenes are running anywhere from 1,700 words to 2,500 words. I'm not even having to think about word count. And my subplots and theme are popping in and out of the story on a regular basis.