I'm trying to meet my characters. While I have a good sense of my main character, none of the others started as more than a name, age and basic job. I hit upon using an image as a visual touchstone which helps.

I've gone back to the beginning and am writing each scene a character is in from their POV. It's a fascinating exercise; they are making themselves known in a way I didn't anticipate, including insisting on background that can't go into the book. So besides writing the scenes, I find myself writing vignettes of interactions between characters.

I now have 3 Scrivner projects for this: the main project holds the novel, as well as all the research and character sheets, one project for the character's view for each scene, and the last contains the vignettes.

I still don't understand my process. It doesn't feel like it's coming from me, but it seems to be working for me.

#writingsf #WritingProcess #writingNewbie #Writing

I want to use this Mastadon account to work through what I'm experiencing while writing. I've contributed to tech books before, given tech talks and written tech articles. I've never experienced a hesitancy during those endeavors. I've never studied creative writing past English classes in high school which was decades ago.

But I've never been able to write fiction. While I've had a rich fantasy life, I've never had the desire to move it from my head to somewhere more public. Add to that I've never been able to, everytime I've sat down to try, my head goes blank. So I never really tried.

But last year, when Russia invaded Ukraine I started finding, not a story, but an entire universe. It's downloading piecemeal into my head. By March I started wanting to write it down but I still came up blank when I sat to it.

I bought myself an inexpensive digital voice recorder and a decent one way microphone. I already had Dragon, a voice activated accessibility tool which I use in my usual work. My version will create transcripts from audio recordings. I found that walking helped loosen my voice. Nothing coming out was good prose, but I was bypassing that block a bit. The transcripts at least helped me when I sat to write. I had a slow system.

So I'm now writing, something. A lot of it was wrestling with ethical issues and lots of explanation of the underlying structure of the world. The problem was it's petty boring to read.

I've gone back and forth on how to start the book. In what voice to use. Nothing really worked it's an expansive story that moves through thousand of years. What I've got now is at least allowing me to write, but it's not great. Still I'm moving the story along.

Not sure why I'm writing this, but here it is.

#Writing #WritingProcess #WritingNewbie

I'm fascinated at how my experiment in writing scenes from each character's point of view is adding so much to each character in ways I didn't expect. I'm learning about their motivations, and small bits of their personalities that I didn't anticipate.

I'm also finding stories that those characters want to tell that don't easily fit into the original story other than a possible reference but gives flavor and nuance to both the character and the world.

I realize this is probably old news to many of you who have been wing, but it's all new and awe-inspiring to me.

#writing #writingNewbie #writingRealizations