Happy New Year
For one year I will post one new scene a day. These scenes will be whatever I can come up with that is coherent and exhibits some characterization or development of setting. None of the scenes will be first drafts. The goal is for me to develop a large base of seedlings from which I can, hopefully, produce some full-grown stories. To further that goal, I will also challenge myself to produce stories from one out of every ten scenes.
This blog is largely inspired by Skull-A-Day and 365 Masks. These are both very cool projects; feel free to drop by and tell the creators how very cool they are. I’m sure there are similar writing exercises out there as well, but I haven’t seen them. If you know of any, please drop me a line and I’ll include them in my links.
Readers are encouraged to offer their input. Completed stories will be submitted to online and print magazines around the world, and I’ll let you know if any of them are accepted for publication.
That’s the gist of the thing. If you are itching for more details, please see Tedious Lecture #1.
Please note: Every scene I post on this site is (c) Dora Badger. Use of these scenes in anyone else’s work without permission is a violation of copyright law. -The previous statements may come across as harsh, but I’m pretty sure I have to make them if I want publishers to purchase any work incorporating the scenes in these pages.-
Tedious lecture on developing self-discipline #1*
*This blog also appears on At Your Door.
If I only had the time…
For years, I told myself that lack of time was the primary reason that I wrote only rarely. Between work and family obligations and my occasional foray onstage, it was legitimately difficult to set regular time aside daily – or even weekly – for fiction writing.
In June, I quit my day job to spend more time working on my comedy and my writing. The plan was for me to design websites and offer support to nonprofit agencies to pay the bills, and to spend my remaining time developing my literary and comedic talents. This hasn’t really worked out as I had hoped.
World enough, and time
Prior to quitting, I had rented a studio and set about creating a workspace that would be the perfect writing space for me. After quitting, I spent a few weeks getting my health back on track. This was absolutely necessary: after a hellacious 11-day travel marathon for my day job, my lupus was acting up and I knew I would be utterly useless without a respite. Finally, I thought, for the first time in nearly twenty years, I had a space that was just for me and enough time to produce the timeless prose and insightful humor that I knew was just waiting to emerge. I would write every day and every word would be, if not gold, at least high-grade silver.
Or maybe not
Once my rest period was over, I quickly found myself spending nearly every waking hour either drumming up enough business to pay the bills or reacting to days-long web design marathons by zoning out courtesy of addictinggames.com. Comedy and writing were both neglected; as of this writing, I have been onstage only once in the past six weeks and have written about two pages of execrable fiction that will probably wind up lining the mouse cages. Those of you who know me well, know how little it takes for me to get disgusted with myself. Normally, a situation like this would leave me creatively paralyzed for at least another six weeks. Fortunately I was able to take the aforementioned respite, and my health really is much better; largely because of this, my mental state is much improved over previous years. I am learning to avoid the temptations of addictinggames.com and am beginning the Fall season with a renewed enthusiasm for my creative pursuits.
Congratulations and all that, but so what?
The point of all of this is, when I came across Skull-A-Day I was able to not only think, I’d like to do something like that one day but to put the thought into action (believe me, two years ago it simply would not have happened).
It did take a while for me to decide exactly what I could produce each day that might be both worthwhile to me creatively, and interesting enough to share with the world at large. The sharing is important: by holding myself accountable to an audience – even a hypothetical one – I am much more likely to remain committed to my goal.
Decisions, decisions
At first I thought, why not just write a sentence a day? I’ve done that in the past and have generated quite a few story ideas. That didn’t seem interesting enough to keep an audience coming back, though, and I quickly discarded the idea. I found a concept a day to be too vague, and too open to the possibility of abuse – the idea behind this whole thing is to develop self-discipline, and with a concept a day I could easily see myself tossing off something like: Woman decides to stalk a local used-car salesman and then immediately forgetting the concept because I didn’t really have to work at it.
Character was suggested by my SO, and I seriously considered it. Creating one well-developed character a day would give me an amazing cast from which to choose when writing future stories. It’s very rare for me to create a character that stands completely alone from a scene or setting, though, so I didn’t feel that would ultimately be very useful to me in the long run. And again, I could easily see: twelve-year-old boy whose parents have divorced; straggly hair becoming acceptable to me during a lull…once more, not really useful and not really within the spirit of the exercise. I was stuck.
One of my best pals ever then suggested a beer a day. Naturally, nothing else got done for another couple of weeks.
I finally decided upon a scene a day, because a well-developed scene offers great opportunities for expansion. It should also include strong characterization or action and/or have a well-defined setting. It gives me enough to play with to keep me interested, offers a challenge to me to expand my range and refine my voice, and hopefully will be inclusive enough to keep an audience coming back for more.
If pressed, however, I have to admit that I don’t really have to work that hard to come up with a decent standalone scene; if it doesn’t have to read well within a larger piece, anyone can probably write a fairly interesting snippet most days of the week. The challenge-within-a-challenge, then, is this: to select one out of every ten scenes to expand into a completed work. The resulting stories, one-acts, whatever, will not be posted on this website, since one of my other goals this year is to have at least three stories accepted for publication. Instead, every work I produce from this exercise will be submitted to magazines and ezines until accepted. If I can find homes for my work, I’ll let you know where to find it.
Readers of this blog are encouraged to comment on the scenes. Feedback is an important part of the creative process, and I welcome your input. Four times over the next year I will also ask readers to vote for one of the scenes that I haven’t already selected; I will complete the work for that scene and share it with you on this site.
My hope is that this exercise will force me to write for at least an hour a day. If anyone else has ideas on how to reinvigorate one’s creative life, I’d love to hear them.
