Holly Lisle update – the conflict ‘versus’.

Well, I haven’t been updating about it in a while because it feels like such a hard slog, but I’m making some progress with the Holly Lisle ‘How to Revise your Novel’ course. I’m on lesson five now, and – well, parts of it are fun, and all of it’s been informative.

Lesson one was the first big inventory of the novel, marking out lots of different things in pen on the hardcopy and filling out worksheets of what works and what doesn’t.

Lesson two had us learning about promises, and counting details to see how important we were promising certain characters and items were.

Lesson three involved a lot of filling out index cards for each scene, and trying to identify protagonists and antagonists, settings, conflict, and twists.

I haven’t said anything about lesson four, and it didn’t take me too long to get through it. That lesson was about plots, subplots, and the broken sequences that aren’t really plots in your first draft.

Lesson five is focusing on conflict, and it’s starting with the core conflict of the entire book. I wanted to share what I’ve got so far with you guys. I’m not sure if the last part – my ‘versus’ sentence, is a bit too long and unwieldy… of course, I’m not sure if any of you know the HTRYN course, but I’m curious about what you may think as outsiders.

What matters about my story.

It’s about two young parents who come to realize that they’re not going to be able to get their daughter ready for her all life by themselves. They need their community to support them, and the community is apathetic, more interested in the present than the future. They have to find a way to inspire the entire ship with their vision, while Ginny is messing with them because she wants to keep on being the pampered princess.

It’s Tom and Melanie versus the selfish parts of their community.

It’s the two parents-to-be, passionate to teach and prepare their child but unprepared themselves, versus the people in the ship’s community who insist on things always being done the way they always have been, who aren’t going to sacrifice their privileges for the sake of the mission, the future, or the children.

 

Blog the cat, Chapter Five – the Board.

Blog the cat screenwriting index.

Okay, in chapter 5 of Save the Cat, “Building the perfect Beast,” Blake Snyder waxes eloquent on The Board. I’m going to skip all of the superlatives, glowing praise, and industry anecdotes for now, and get down to describing the core idea.

You set up a big, flat, vertical working space – Blake prefers a corkboard that he can pin index cards to, and use this to arrange your story ideas on. It’s a way of working with the screenplay structure that’s visual, tactile, and ‘a great time-waster’, except that the point is that the time isn’t actually wasted, in the end. It’s just being put to a use that isn’t immediately obvious, because as you play with the board and keep rearranging things, the ideas are being arranged and correlated by your subconscious mind in a way that you could never achieve with conscious disciplined hard work staring at a blank Celtx screen.

Like a lot of Blake’s notions, the Board is fairly structured. He sets it up in four rows of approximately ten scenes each, (plus or minus one spot per row, but still to come up to a total of forty scenes per screenplay.) The timeline of the movie gets arranged on this board a little like a really huge Fan expo autograph line, going left to right across the top row for Act One, then turning the corner, going back the second row and across the third for Act Two, then back the bottom row for Act Four.

National Novel Writing Month 2010 – Day 1

Stats Roundup:

Words written today: 2,588

Scenes written: 6

Times I’ve had to resort to brackets and [include something I’ll research later in here]: 1

Local write-ins attended: 1

Local writers that attended the write-in, including me: 6

Times my eeePC started flashing a low-battery light during the day: 1

Characters appeared from my outline: 3

Characters appeared who weren’t included in my outline: 2

A good start to the month, overall.