So – I was looking over my posts so far and I have a couple of drafts that I haven’t published. One was a post I was supposed to publish before NaNoWriMo, in preparation for it, and there’s this one. Here’s how I started it out: “Something interesting happened today. I was looking over a post I hadn’t published yet. Apparently it was from before I’d had a brainstorm of brilliance.”
First of all, apparently I have a problem with unpublished posts. Secondly, I wasn’t sure what I was talking about in the first paragraph of this post. I remember now, and now I have 2 options for the topic. I don’t want to just delete this post- waste not, I suppose, so I think I’ll just do both topics.
Topic 1, the idea I came up with upon rereading my paragraph and- for a moment- having no idea what it meant: In writing, one can easily leave off on a sentence that, upon returning to your work, will make absolutely no sense, as was my case when I read the unpublished post. What brilliant brainstorm was I talking about- and why in the world did I decide to stop writing after making a conceited comment like that? The answer to that question is that I simply lost interest, but that’s besides the point.
What do you do when you get back to whatever you’re reading, and the last thing you wrote doesn’t make any sense? The easy thing to do is to just get rid of it, but somehow that feels wrong. Waste not, I guess. The best thing to do, I think, is to simply go with whatever new topic comes up in your head and write about that instead, as I am doing in this case.
I’m pretty sure this is the ‘Panster’ way of writing, where you come up with a basic plot and then just write it and come up with things as you go. I’m starting to realize that I do this quite a lot! Half of the story I just finished writing this November was stuff I had no idea I’d be writing, and some of it I wrote simply because I felt like it. (technically I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but it’s fun) It’s very interesting, because sometimes it can take your story in a totally different direction with your characters doing totally different things than you ever thought possible!
Topic 2, the original topic for this post (which I should’ve done first because now I don’t remember it again. In a second I will remember it again… it’s coming….):
Oh yes! I apparently mentioned that my storylines, the ‘present day’ in my story, and the part where they go the past, which is Civil War era, do not match. Everything’s a blur, so I don’t remember if I actually did say that here. To recap: at the beginning of my story the storyline that’s going on in ‘present’ day (which is actually some time in the future) is more fitting to the Revolutionary War, where a group of people are trying to break away from a tyrannical authority. In the past storyline, obviously it’s about two groups of people disagreeing over several various matters. It did bug me that they didn’t match, and so I couldn’t do parallels.
Well, in an interesting twist, it turned out they did match. And actually the two possible topics for this post also match up, because in this case, I was happily writing along in my usual I-don’t-technically-know-where-I’m-going/Panster way, when I discovered a way to make the two storylines coincide. It is amazing when this happens because it doesn’t seem possible (actually I think one’s subconscious brain is aware of the connections and that’s how you eventually get there. It’s the only thing that makes sense).
So, I’m not exactly sure where I was going to go with that topic, because it sort of seems to leave my readers in the middle of dull field with no way to get back. One should usually lead one’s readers back to somewhere interesting so they don’t have to leave the page feeling- odd, like they took two steps with their left foot. I guess, what I should say is that one should try writing Panster way, because often one actually does know where you’re going, even if it doesn’t seem like it.
At the same time, you really need to control your plot twists! I had so many there at the end that it was getting ridiculous, and it was all going to blow up anyway! I didn’t do one plot twists, but my story really needs to be cleaned up a bit.
(from this point onwards I digress because it’s been a long day and I’m tired, so don’t bother reading if you don’t like digression)
So, there you go. I’ve taken care of one unpublished post. I still haven’t figured out what happened to the first part of my bloopers (not that it’s important. For some reason my type of sense of humor delights in very strange mistakes, like bloopers). I need to figure out if it’s possible to create an actual page where I can talk about music, where you can add separate posts- or is that what the categories are for? I like things filed away properly (not that I’m organized at all) rather than all piled up together.
Felicity Prose 