I added 500 more words to my new short this morning. It’s been easy so far. I introduced a new character today; tomorrow I will need to spend time considering her motivation before I continue the narrative. I don’t know for sure how long this story will be, but at 1,000 words, I feel as though I’m about 1/3 of the way through.
This story is a stand-alone part of a larger project I’ve had in mind for about a year. I hadn’t written much for the project aside from about 1,000 words in notes about the overall structure and I wondered if the characters were ever going to become solid enough to write about. Now that I’ve started one piece of it, they are starting to grow. The current piece’s protagonist, eight-year-old Stephen Regan, is one of the principle characters of the larger work. Not only is this story coming along, but a vignette featuring seventeen-ear-old Stephen occurred to me last night on the way home from work. I sketched a summary of it in my journal before I went to bed, and this morning it has already become clearer. It looks as though I won’t have to spend any time thinking about what my next short story will be when I finish this one–and that my goal of writing six new stories this year will be easier to achieve than I’d thought.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Terry Odell // Jan 9, 2010 at 9:55 am
Sounds like you’re on a roll. Keep going. I admire writing a child as protagonist. I did a kid POV short, and have a young child in one of my novels. They’re hard to keep real. I’m reading a Tami Hoag now, and she’s got a bunch of 5th graders as POV characters; she’s managed to capture the angst of being a kid very well. Of course, that’s making me wonder how MY kids felt growing up!
2 Sam // Jan 9, 2010 at 10:33 am
I am on a roll! I added another 500 this morning.
3 Terry Odell // Jan 11, 2010 at 10:53 am
Good for you — I edited about 10 chapters and cut about 500 words. That must be where they went.
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