{"id":69,"date":"2007-11-07T03:00:56","date_gmt":"2007-11-07T09:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=69"},"modified":"2007-11-07T03:00:56","modified_gmt":"2007-11-07T09:00:56","slug":"500-words-exactly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/500-words-exactly\/","title":{"rendered":"500 words EXACTLY"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>And I did it all in about half an hour before running off to an Arabic speaking appointment.\u00a0 But that&#8217;s not the half of it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been feeling these past few weeks that the plot in my story has been advancing very slowly.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve only written maybe 5,000 words in that time, but it seems like everything has been dragging on really slowly.\u00a0 I haven&#8217;t really been bringing in any new ideas to move the story much.<\/p>\n<p>But now, in the scene I&#8217;m working in, I decided to start moving on.\u00a0 At first, I had no idea what this scene would be like.\u00a0 But then, I just grabbed at something that made sense and ran with it, and other ideas came from that idea for a scene.\u00a0 And then, more ideas, from that as well.<\/p>\n<p>Then, as I was working on the dialogue in this scene, I started getting really excited about it because the stuff they were speaking about was actually surprising me, and giving me even more ideas for how the story could go!\u00a0 If I didn&#8217;t have a writing appointment right then, I probably would have written for another hour or so, just to run with it!\u00a0 It was pretty cool!<\/p>\n<p>So, yeah, you could say that I&#8217;m still at that stage where I&#8217;m always coming up with cool new ideas for the story.\u00a0 In fact, I really don&#8217;t have that much of an outline&#8211;just a general idea of what I want to happen up to about the midway point (maybe a little bit after), and then this vague nebulous idea of the huge twist that happens around then.\u00a0 I have a good idea of the world where this all happens, and a general pattern for each character, but not too much more than that.\u00a0 The result is that this story surprises me even when I&#8217;m in the very act of writing it.\u00a0 And then I come up with cool ideas, and it gets even more exciting, and I just have a very fun time with the whole thing in general.<\/p>\n<p>I suppose, though, that I shouldn&#8217;t just run with every idea that pops into my head first.\u00a0 I need to think about it (and, what with so may interruptions from writing, I definitely have enough time to do that).\u00a0 The other thing is that I need to keep a good idea of what is going on in the story globally.\u00a0 If all the stuff that&#8217;s happened in the last 20 pages from where I left off isn&#8217;t present in my mind, there is going to be a disconnect.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t want to be so focused on one particular page that I lose the sense of what it&#8217;s like to read the story as a whole.<\/p>\n<p>Other than that&#8230;am I missing anything?\u00a0 I&#8217;m just an amateur at this, and though this isn&#8217;t my first novel attempt, if I&#8217;m successful it will be the first one that I finish.\u00a0 Any suggestions that will save me headaches, trouble, and my personal sense of self worth in the future?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And I did it all in about half an hour before running off to an Arabic speaking appointment.\u00a0 But that&#8217;s not the half of it. I&#8217;ve been feeling these past few weeks that the plot in my story has been advancing very slowly.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve only written maybe 5,000 words in that time, but it seems&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/500-words-exactly\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">500 words EXACTLY<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[8,4],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-writing-in-general","tag-the-lost-colony","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-17","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}