Day 3

Day 3
So you might be thinking to yourself, hey, she can't even keep herself motivated to write her story.  Why is she gonna start a blog to have to keep up too?
Well folks, plain and simple: accountability.  If I have to write everyday in order to keep up my blog, then that's what I'll do.

You will likely come to find how disappointing this blog is, because I won't actually post the story up here.  I may post excerpts from time to time, but the whole story will not be posted.

This is a place for me to hash out the details in my head, share a little about my writing tactics, and keep myself on track.

This goal might not seem to lofty, but in actuality, it will become that way over time.  Right now, I'm on summer vacation.  No work, no school.  But in September, I start student teaching and go back to my full-time credentialing program.

Thus arose the need for some way to keep me motivated.  Something to keep me going.  I came up with the idea for a blog because I have so many things I want to make sure I add in, so many great ways to keep motivated I've thought of, and a place to empty my mind to help clear it up to see what's happening in my story.

So you guys are tuning in on day 3.  I decided on 100 days because I found this website when looking for ways to keep motivated.  This website is posted at the top of my story to make sure I check it everyday.

On day 1, I wrote roughly 5,000 words! What a great day for writing!

I am currently up to 6,753 words as of this moment.

Ding!  Time for things I've learned about my writing style:

I used to hate thinking about my stories when I didn't have a laptop in front of me.  I didn't want to forget to add things, so I would only think about my stories while writing, and I would push them out of my head when I wasn't writing.
Since I started this story, I've just let myself think about the story.  This helps because it really creates a world rather than a story.  There's so much about their world that doesn't get written, that it makes it more realistic in the long run.  You'll never be able to write everything you know about something real.  This is how it should be in stories too.

I spend a lot of my time going back and adding things in.  At first, I thought this was a bad thing.  Shouldn't we just write to bulk up the word count and ignore our flaws until we go back through later?
No.
When I started my story, I knew my characters just about as well my readers will the first time they crack open the cover against the stubborn spine and are introduced to Daisy and Jack.
As I get to know my characters better, I flesh them out and develop their flaws and features.  I want to make sure they aren't doing things that are out of character.
It's a lot easier to rectify these gaps in continuity before I've written the whole book on the pretense of inaccuracies too.
The better I know my characters, the better I am able to say, "Yeah, they would do this," or, "No, they wouldn't have done that."
It makes them more real, and helps you readers to actually believe them better.

Conflict - I have always had the most struggle with this element.  I don't like conflict in real life, books and movies I take the time to engage with, and in my own stories.  I have a hard time creating it, because I don't like when bad things happen.  This story is great because it starts out with a problem.  Good strategy for writers whose favorite movie is Napoleon Dynamite.

I have always, always, ALWAYS struggled with the likability of my characters.  I start out writing a story and love my characters.  After about 10 pages, I realize how irritating they are, and usually don't write on the story again.  I am working on trying to embrace the irritating things about characters, but honestly, an ideal story for me to write would have included the main characters dying off at the end of each chapter, and new ones emerging.
This was a problem.  In my story, however, time is less of a tangible thing, and more of a feeling.  It works out great because my characters rapidly progress, and I am able to mature them past their irritating character traits.  They are still the same person, but they are more experienced and have more control over themselves.
I watch a lot of the show Doctor Who, and the episode with Madame De Pompadour gave me the idea for an element that I have incorporated into the story.
One of my characters starts out very childish and playful.  He exits the world and returns much more mature.  Because descriptions are vague, I don't have to deal with his physical appearance changing.  That's not the important part of the story, and it doesn't change much.  There are a few physical descriptions, and there will be more as the story progresses, but for now they are unnecessary, which works in my favor.

So now, for the part we've all been waiting for, I will post an excerpt from my story.

At this point in the story, Jack has just stumbled into Daisy's world, and he took her to show her something with a fervent excitement.
Hope you enjoy!


When they were almost to their destination, Jack took Daisy’s hand, despite her reluctance, and ducked beneath the branches hanging above. He pulled her along through the foliage. Suddenly he burst through the trees into a clearing. There was a large, chalky cliff to the right, and an empty river bed at the bottom. Daisy pulled her hand away and clasped it in her other.


“This is why you were excited?” Daisy said flatly. Jack looked about, confused.

“Well, where’d it go? It was so beautiful when I first got here.” Jack contemplated to himself.

“How long have you been here?” Daisy asked.

“Not long, but there was this amazing waterfall! It was stunning. It couldn’t have been longer ago than yesterday…”

“Things like that disappear after storms.” Daisy said matter-of-factly. She chose her wording wisely. He didn’t need to know about the tornadoes, the havoc. She did enjoy finally being the one who knew something.

“But it was just here,” Jack touched the dry river bed. The powdery dirt cracked beneath his finger tips with the guise of ancient emptiness. It was as though the waterfall had never existed. Daisy shrugged. “I told you,” she said. She walked to the cliff wall and put a hand on it. She stared up the long distance above to the top of the cliff.

“I wonder what’s up there,” Daisy asked.

“I know what used to be up there, what’s up there sometimes, but if this is how it goes, who knows what happened to all that?” Jack said. He was upset. He pushed his palm into the river bed, unwilling to accept that the water was gone. Daisy walked over to him and hesitantly patted his shoulder with a comforting hand on his shoulder, crouching to his level.

“I- I’m sorry it’s not what you remember, Jack. You’ll get used to it,” Daisy stammered awkwardly. She wasn’t used to being this way. Not talking to people, and certainly not consoling them.

Jack looked into Daisy’s eyes. “How do you deal with it?” Jack looked as though he could cry.

“It’s just a waterfall, Jack.”

“How long have you been here then?” Jack asked, collapsing to sitting on the dirt.

“Well, forever, I guess,” Daisy contemplated. “I don’t remember not being here. It used to be so different, but it was always here.”

“So I guess I really am the intruder, huh?” Jack sulked a little, but his face brightened after a moment. “At least neither of us is alone here.” Daisy wasn’t sure yet that this was her preference too.

“I wasn’t doing so bad…” Daisy trailed off.

“You’d never seen the color blue. How can you be doing great?”

“Color?” Daisy asked.

“Colors… most things here don’t have color. Like, my eyes are blue, the daisies were white and yellow. That’s it, that I’ve seen. When I got here the river was green with trees and the water was blue, too.” Jack said, assuming his role as the more knowledgeable one again.

“Oh, is that what they’re called?” Daisy asked. The house must be colors then.

“Yeah. But it’s boring here, nothing is colorful. It could be so beautiful here.” Jack seemed distant in thought. “The place I came from had so many different colors! Yellow buses and blue sky. Not like here at all. I don’t understand where all the color is.”