Worldbuilding Woes

I’ve been sick, which is a wonderful excuse to not be doing the writing thing. Past week or so, the sickness has mostly been with the coughing and less with the general feeling of ickypooawfulness, so I gathered together the tattered fragments of my motivation and forced my ridiculously grumpy self into a chair, in front of a keyboard, with the wifi turned off.

No dessert till I eat my green beans.

(This tactic never actually worked on me as a child. My stubbornness and hatred of vegetables and strong smells was such that I fell asleep at the table rather than eat them. It works better when I’m the one setting the ultimatum, since I actually BELIEVE in my motivations, even if I superficially dig my heels in at them.)

ANYWHOO, I wrote for about an hour, hated the whole thing, and gently patted myself on the head for having done anything at all.

As I fall asleep, I tend to play with stories. Daydreaming, mental fanfiction, planning for my own stuff — whatever seems like a fun toy at the moment. That night, I mentally unshelved the bit I’d written and tried to imagine where I’d go from there, and I hated it.

So I mentally shelved it and became a unicorn. Don’t judge.

Next morning, while doing dishes, I unshelved it again. Not intentionally, mind you. Just sort of idly, because I KNOW that I loved the idea for this story when I got started, so I knew I could love it again. This was less of me being a good productive writer, and more me prodding reflexively at a sore tooth.

And I thought of a new way to open the story.

I had zero confidence that it was the RIGHT way, but I realized it wouldn’t cost me much to at least start it and see how it felt.

So I wrote the new beginning. And it IS better. Punchier. More fun. More active.

It feels really weird to just … idly mention something without any point of reference. But that’s how I’m writing this one. I’m writing it as if the reader already knows what I’m talking about, with as little explanation as possible. I’ll add more back in when I do my revisions, of course, but for now, I’m blazing through dialogue and action and not worrying about it too much.

In other words, I’m writing the STORY first, and worrying about the explanation for things as a secondary concern instead of doing it the other way around by trying to make sure that the reader is on comfortable ground before the story kicks into high gear.

We’ll see how successful it is, but for now it feels like a stronger story.

Related posts:

The First Quarter Of The Book
It’s Working!
Tea-Stressing