End of the Week Writing Update

Well, this is kind of an end of the week wrap up. You might not hear much from me on into Tuesday because midterms are here and baring their ugly teeth. I've got a World Literature test, an American literature test, and a Intro to Film test. Yuck. Shouldn't be too bad though. My Psych test was last week, so I least I don't have to worry about that.

So, yeah, writing. My friends and I are trying to start a writer's club where we meet and critique and stuff. The last one was kind of a bust. Since it was just basically us friends who hang out all the time, nobody took it too seriously, and some people only came to make my roommate feel better. One girl stopped caring halfway through the meeting and complained if anybody wanted to read anything longer than 3 pages...and then she read the longest poem I'd ever seen a student write. It was, like, 14 pages. Another girl there just didn't care and talked during the readings and just didn't take anything too seriously. Most of what was accomplished was...well...nothing. We still don't even know when to set the usual meetings. We're setting them for Tuesdays at 6:30, but that's just a tentative schedule, and we still don't know whether we want to meet every week or every other week. Meanwhile, my friend has been trying to gather up some people other than just us friends so the meetings will be more formal and structured. This thing will probably collapse, but I think it's cool of them to try.

As for actual writing, I've started a new story. I've decided that free form is just not the structure for me. I can't do "seat of your pants" writing, I go off on irrelevant tangents, and I catch myself with a whole lot of scenes where the main character is just doing mundane tasks. I realize that in scene something should change to make it significant, even if it's a small change, and with that in mind, I've been trying to make sure all of my scenes involve a change or action of some kind. I also laid out the basic ideas that I wanted, which I've done before, but I've been using a technique I got from Holly Lisle's plot course where I can fill in the blank spaces between key scenes with relevant scenes instead of fluff and filler. So it's been going pretty well.

Interestingly enough, when I finished mapping out the basic concept of the story, I realized that it's very similar to a story I tried to write before, but with a slightly different take on it. It's more organized, more streamlined, and hopefully it'll flow better because of that.

Also, for you writers who are a bit more disciplined than I am, NaNoWriMo is just around the corner. In case you don't know, that stands for National Novel Writing Month. If you don't live in the US, that's fine. National doesn't really mean anything. Anyone can participate, and if you think you're up to the challenge, you can go here to register. I want to participate in one someday, but I never have the time. And by never have the time I mean that I don't want to risk my scholarship and my schoolwork. I'm not very good at balancing my daily tasks -- it's one of the things I'm trying to work on -- and I'm hoping I can work towards participating in one in the near future. If you have anymore questions about NaNo you can look here, and I hope you guys have fun.

That's all I've got right now. Have a good weekend guys. I'm going to hit the books.