Outwitting Myself

I’ve discovered a trick to keep Diva from becoming a full-fledged writing project.

Okay, a couple of tricks. One, I write one scene over a series of twenty minute bursts, picking up where I left off and blasting things onto the screen as they occur to me so I end up with a longer-than-normal exercise that is, in fact, more than one exercise. It’s sorta kinda working in one instance, but I’m not completely happy with the method because I still hang up on detail. The longer a scene becomes, the harder it is to keep it raw and fluid—I’m working on a resolution, but that’s what happens at present.

Trick number two is to take twenty minutes and write a scene-within-a-scene. For instance, in Diva IX, where Dane and Ellie are building their relationship, I was sorely tempted to expand on the dialogue, which threatened (again) the spontaneous purpose of the exercise. So instead, I marked my e-copy with an asterisk so I know where more detail is required. I’ll transcribe the conversation or elaborate on the narrative in a different exercise and drop them into the applicable scene when I start organizing the parts into a greater whole. It’s like writing a patchwork quilt, I suppose, creating a bunch of little works that will eventually form a larger one.

So where I was almost stalled, I’ve found a way to keep this particular project—because who am I kidding? There’s a good story here—fun to write and the momentum flowing.

More to come!