“I do my best thinking when I’m not actively pursuing a thought. Ideas are like small prey, scuttling into corners when a cat tries to chase them, coming out to play when the cat sits silent and unmoving.”
Raven Cursed by Faith Hunter
As some of you may know, I have been working on a novel about a Courtesan named Marisol. The story was set in a future Utopian-esque society. I worked on it for awhile, but I kept getting stuck. I changed plot points and uncomplicated the story. Yet, Marisol’s story never flowed properly.
After I had taken the writing class, I realized part of the reason why I was struggling because I was doing so much wrong. Some of it was sentence structure issues. Guess how many of my sentences started with a “There are”? A lot. No child can count that high. Some of my other issues were plot structure and story idea related. Marisol’s story complicated enough that my readers were confused. Plot holes existed throughout the story. I changed the original so much, the meaning of the story got lost.
I am not sure where the original idea came. It probably came to me in a dream, in a place where I wasn’t actively pursuing a story idea. The story idea grew organically, and when I asked a friend which story I should do for class, she chose this one. And it blossomed into something I couldn’t have imagined.
Maya is the new protagonist of my new dystopian world. She’s a a young widow, mother of 2 children. She has lost a lot, and is in the process of losing more. And you better believe it takes place in the Greater DC/MD/VA area. The short had rave reviews and was truly the best story I have written. I had a lot of help, but that’s how you get to the place of dreams. I still have a lot to learn, but learning is a part of the process.
So, I will be talking to you about Maya. I am using the book by Alan Watt called The 90-Day Novel: Unlock the story within. I can’t follow his advice and work on my story every day for 90 days, but by the end of summer I’ll have a completed novel? We’ll see. I’m still taking classes and still in the process of trying to find a good writer’s group. I hope you like the new direction of my writing!
A Stranger In My Skin 