1/20/06: And we're off again

[davidlevine]

Word count: 1465 | Since last entry: 1465

Yesterday evening I did a bunch of iPod-related stuff, noticing at nearly midnight that I had not yet done any writing for the day. So I looked over the Carpet story, made a few edits suggested by the lovely coreolis, and put it in the mail. I gave myself a blue star for submitting a story. (The other star colors are: silver for 100-500 words or any amount of revision, gold for 500-1000 words, red for 1000+ words, and green for sending a story to critique. So far I have at least one star on every day of 2006.)

Tonight I was good and spent the whole evening writing. After looking over the ideas in my Writing Ideas file, and rejecting all those that were too big, required too much research, or just didn't appeal right now, I was left with about twenty -- all science fiction but one (and that one a weird one), and about half of those space-based. My last two stories were also space-based SF, so I wanted to do something different... but one of those ideas, one that dates back to Clarion, grabbed me. So I started in on it. It even has a title: "Second Chance" (which describes both the main character's situation and the larger situation of which he is a part).

Only one small problem: I think this might be shaping up to be a novel. Or at least a novella. Well, for once I'm just going to dive in, with the plot in my teeth, and see where I find myself when I emerge on the other side.

A snippet: "Uncurling, I grasped for an attach point, but misjudged my reach and scraped my hand on the rough plastic panel joint next to it. My body was all wrong -- too thin, too long, the skin as delicate as a baby's. Nothing was where I expected it to be. My heart started to pound again and I took slow, deep breaths to calm myself."

Comments

[davidlevine]

It's hard to articulate. Over the years I've developed an instinct for the length a particular idea wants to be, and it's gotten pretty accurate (+/- 500 words in the short story realm). It has to do with the complexity of the plot, the number of characters, and the degree to which the setting has to be fleshed out in order for the story to work.

I think that this story-length sense is closely coupled with the plot-focused way I work. I generally know before I start work on a story, or very shortly after I start, exactly how it ends and most of the major twists that have to happen to get there. More twists, longer story.

On this particular piece, I know the setting and situation, and a few critical things about the main character. All else is fuzzy, but I know that there are about 7 distinct characters (I don't know who any of them are, but the situation wouldn't work with a much smaller or larger number of people). I had a climax in mind when I started, but as I move forward I'm finding that it's not the end of the story, nor is it necessarily the climax the story actually wants.

The story is turning (in my head... as far as what I've typed so far, I've barely established the situation) from a story of conflict between people who are trapped together in a difficult situation into something much like a locked-room murder mystery... except that the mystery is not who killed someone, but who brought someone to life. (Cloning is involved.) But it still is a story of people trapped together in a difficult situation, and managing the multiple character interactions while solving the mystery and coping with the difficult situation raises the complexity to much more than short-story levels.

So. I'm just going to plow forward for a while and see if it starts to shape up. This is a new experience for me -- we'll see how it goes!