Writing, Creatively
I found a writer's group! It's been meeting at my local library (2.5 miles from my house) for two years. I had asked about a writer's group a while back, but was directed to the website, which didn't list it until last week. Oh well. I've found them now! Sadly, they only meet once a month, but it's still a lot more than I had before. The group is lead by a writing teacher with her MFA. She does a pretty good job guiding critiques and questions for writer's of varying levels. I didn't bring anything that first week because I wanted to check out the group and see how things went. I hope I have a short story, personal essay, poem or something to bring next time (in spite of NaNoWriMo). Speaking of NaNoWriMo, I'm going to try it again this year. I need to be writing more, and 2,000 words a day shouldn't be such an out there goal for someone who wants to write for a living. I'm determined to meet my 50,000 word goal by the end of the month. One of the women in my new writer's group is a three time NaNoWriMo champ so she was handing out flyers last week. She told me I should try again and that I should also come to the kick-off party on Sunday. When Borders was going out of business I bought the No Plot, No Problem Novel Writing Kit. I've also been scratching variations of a novel idea in my notebook since the summer. I figure these things combined meant I should probably tackle NaNoWriMo one more time. I went to the launch party. It was fun. At the end they had us write the idea for our novel on a 3 x 5 card and pass it around. Then, everyone wrote ideas for our novel on the card that we can turn to if we get stuck. I got some very random (and a few helpful) ideas that way, but it seems like a good way for getting unstuck when that inevitably happens. Here the novel idea: The main character is a 20-something female who keeps falling into parallel universes/other worlds*. Sometimes she comes to a world and knows who she is and where she is. Sometimes she has to figure out her place in the world. Sometimes she has no place and wanders until the next jump. Inciting Incident: She accidentally brings a passenger with her, which throws off the world jumping she's been doing her entire life. Its only then that she begins to piece together what's been happening to her and begins remember her lives in other worlds. What she wants: She wants to find out who she is and what is happening to her. She would also like to figure out if she has a home. A few notes: --Timelines in all of the worlds move differently (I will need a chart). Sometimes no time passes while she is gone. Other times, she comes back generations later. In one life I think she will come back much older than she should be. She ages on her own timeline. --Until now, she has never been aware of all these various lives. She only holds the memory of her life from whatever world she is currently in. Obviously, she gets suspicious sometimes, but she only has one world where she has started to figure things out. --Her hitchhiker eventually finds her after getting separated from her and doing some world jumping himself and comes along for the journey too. --Life exists in some way outside of all of the worlds. Do you guys have any ideas for things that should or could happen along the way? Some of the helpful suggests I have are: --She comes to a new world where she doesn't understand the language. --She enters a world that is actually a dream, but she has a hard time telling the difference. --The Doctor shows up. (This isn't actually helpful since I'm not writing fan fiction, but it was worth sharing.) *Based on my limited knowledge and tiny bits of research, there are a lot of different rules or opinions about how parallel universes work. I don't care. It's my novel; I'm making them up fresh. Should I come up with my own term for them? |
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