Check-in!

[misslucyjane]

It's your weekly check-in for the first week of March. How are you doing? Any deadlines coming up? Need help brainstorming? Need a nudge?



One thing we new mods tossed around was to have discussion topics, so here's a topic for this week. There's a well-loved quote from Kurt Vonnegut jr:

Every character should want something, even if it's a glass of water.

I recently went through my WIP and wrote out what my main character wants for every chapter, hoping it would help me find what to focus on during rewrites. (So far, so good.) So your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out what is the I want for your current story. Please do share it if you wish.

Comments

[lassarina]

I dusted off the 2015 NaNo manuscript and put some words in it. They aren't very good. But they were words, and maybe I'm working toward the actual climax scene. Needs more tension, but I can fix that in editing.

[gehayi]

Just got another manuscript to edit (85K).

In terms of personal writing, I'm feeling completely uninspired--which is annoying.

Beginning March

[dialecticdreamer]

I mean that in the sense of movement, too, because so many things have conspired to drag down the time I have to write. But I'm being stubborn-as-a-rock, and in the first two days of the month wrote 4,251 words.

They're about half blog posts, and the other half is the first draft of a new short story, one of about fifteen I've intended to write for MONTHS.

That feels like progress.

I'm very good with characterization, but I rely heavily on dialogue in storytelling. My immediate, knee jerk reaction to the question "What does my character wawnt?" (which is easy to establish) is "WHAT is standing in their way?" That pairs a strength with a weakness, and makes the latter easier to figure out.

But finding out if that makes better-words-on-paper will mean checking back toward the end of March, which I'd like to request. Seeing others test different methods and talk about how that affected their writing would be wonderful.

[crookedspoon]

Has anyone ever written a porn shoot in progress or someone watching porn describing what happened? I claimed a gang bang prompt in a challenge that works well with a pornstar au I'm writing, but I can't figure out how to write this in a way that it's sexy and not technical. I mean, there are a lot of limbs to contend with, and I don't want to sound like a manual.

[butterflydreaming]

What the *villain* wants is a pondering of inspiration! It's been a bad week for writing, for me. Some of the problem is that a comment/review inspired a slight deviation from progress on known material, and now I find myself feeling out a few scenes with the villain that I hadn't planned for. I thought I could finish off this fic last month.