No, I'm not on a treadmill. I'm talking about my latest novel.
I used to think I was a "seat of my pants" writer, having faith in my lush and fertile mind will just ~magically~ show me where my story needs to go without any real plotting or planning or world-building because, like, I'm just so fucking special. The special-est. Special fucking snowflake.
This train of thought lasted for about THREE YEARS. Until yesterday.
It just took reading one little blog once (twice, actually) to change my whole world and show me what a damn amateur I've been with my writing. And how little I've taken it seriously. And how lazy I've been. Here's the blog post, it's pretty damn amazing: 2k to 10k. It shows just as it says, how the author got from writing 2k words a day to pants-dropping 10 THOUSAND words a day. Seriously. And it makes so much sense. I got to that blog from this blog which is also pretty amazing. She also follows a lot of the things in the 2k to 10k blog and she seems super super organized, which I am helllllllla jealous of.
I now know I am a plotter. Or better put, I need to be. I need to sit and do the work before I can just write and be like "oooooooh look at meeeeee, look at my writing, look at how much of a writer I am!" So embarrassing. I need to lock my doors, open up my mind and discover my own world before I can write about it. Sounds so obvious, but it took me this long to really realize it, to realize that there is so much to be done before I can put more words on a page. So this weekend is all going to be plotting, world-building, character sheets, "screenplays", timelines and the other junk that turn a story from just a story to a world with depth and passion and emotion and remarkability.
Yippie freakin' skippie.
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